the sea. It was decided to bury the poet in the churchyard
of Birchington. The funeral, which was a private one, was attended by
relatives and personal friends only, with one or two well-wishers from
London.

Next day we saw most of the friends away by train, and, some days later,
Mr. Watts was with myself the last to leave. I thought we two were drawn
the closer each to each from the loss of him by whom we were brought
together. We walked one morning to the churchyard and found the grave,
which nestles under the south-west porch, strewn with flowers.
The church is an ancient and quaint early Gothic edifice, somewhat
rejuvenated however, but with ivy creeping over its walls. The prospect
to the north is of sea only: a broad sweep of landscape so flat and so
featureless that the great sea dominates it. As we stood there, with the
rumble of the rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we felt that
though we had little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last
sleep here, no other place could be quite so fit. It was, indeed, the
resting-place for a poet. In this bed, of all others, he must at length,
after weary years of sleeplessness, sleep the only sleep that is deep
and will endure. Thinking of the incidents which I have in this chapter
tried to record, my mind reverted to a touching sonnet which the friend
by my side had just printed; and then, for the first time, I was struck
by its extraordinary applicability to him whom we had laid below. In its
printed form it was addressed to Heine, and ran:

Thou knew'st that island far away and lone
Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
In spray of music and the breezes shake
O'er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
While that sweet music echoes like a moan
In the island's heart, and sighs around the lake
Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.

Life's ocean, breaking round thy senses' shore,
Struck golden song as from the strand of day:
For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay--
Pain's blinking snake around the fair isle's core,
Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
Around thy lovely island evermore.

"How strangely appropriate it is," I said, "to Rossetti, and now I
remember how deeply he was moved on reading it."

"He guessed its secret; I addressed it, for disguise, to Heine, to whom
it was sadly inappl