“Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,”
ending with the despairing cry upon the deaf goddess of repose—
“O Night, Night, Night! art thou not known to me,
A thicket hung with masks of mockery,
And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears?”
Many such nights Rossetti bore, we may well believe, before he fled at last, when rational means seemed of no avail against his malady, to that most dangerous source of ease, the too free use of chloral. Several times he partially shook off the habit, and intervals of comparative comfort and cheerfulness were frequent until 1872, when other phases of illness, independent of it though still of nervous origin, further undermined the constitution already weakened by years of abnormal strain. A respite of a very pleasant kind was afforded him in the successive autumns of 1868–69 by his visits to Miss Boyd at Penkill, in Perthshire, where, in company with other congenial spirits, he spent some weeks of comparative happiness and ease. Here he was induced to resume his poetry, which, save for a few significant sonnets, had lain in abeyance since that sad day on which he had buried his manuscripts in the grave of his early love. Now, yielding with much reluctance and conflict of heart to the persuasion of friends who knew the value of the poems thus lost to literature, he gave permission for the coffin to be exhumed, and the manuscripts removed. The story of this delicate task, and of its judicious and successful fulfilment under the personal superintendence of two or three intimate friends of the widower, has already been related in detail by one of the eye-witnesses aforesaid. The poems, after seven years’ concealment in the quiet grave in Highgate Cemetery, were duly restored to their author’s hand. This having been done, he set to work arranging, re-writing, and adding some of the finest work of his poetic maturity to a collection of poems which should be an immortal record and perpetuation of his love.
Towards the close of 1869 Rossetti began to share with his friend William Morris the romantic and picturesque old manor house of Kelmscott, near Lechdale, in Gloucestershire; a district full of interesting landscape, and haunted by the inspiring shade of Shelley, who there wrote his characteristic fragment, “A Summer Evening in Lechdale Churchyard.” The scenery of the surrounding country is brought in vivid glimpses here and there into Rossetti’s poetry, as, for instance, in “Down Stream” (“Between Holmscote and Hurstcote”) and other lyrics of his later life. Here he painted “The Bower Maiden”—a pretty country lass with marigolds. But a great part of his time was still spent at home in Chelsea, where in 1871 he at last completed the finest oil version of “Dante’s Dream.” Save for the incomparable “Beata Beatrix,” it is the summing-up of all his highest interpretations of the Dante spirit; the consummation of his gospel of romantic love. His friend Mr. Val Prinsep quotes Rossetti as writing in a letter about this time:—“I should like of all things to show you my big picture ‘Dante’s Dream’ now, if you are ever in town. Indeed, I should probably have written to you before this of the picture being in a state to see, on the chance of its accelerating your movements townwards, but was deterred from doing so by the fact that every special appointment I have made to show it has been met by the clerk of the weather with such a careful provision of absolute darkness for that day and hour, that I tempt my fate no more in that way, as the picture cannot absolutely be seen except in a fair light, and one’s nerves do not hold out for ever under such onslaughts.... Everyone who has seen the ‘Dante’s Dream’ (not yet quite finished, but close upon), has seemed so thoroughly pleased with it that I think I may hope without vanity some progress has been made, and this I feel sure I shall carry on in my next work. Of course I have only shown the ‘Dante’ to a few, as otherwise I might spend my time in nothing else, the picture blocking up the whole studio when displayed.”
Ten years later, in 1881, the “Dante’s Dream” gained for the painter one of the very few popular triumphs of his lifetime. It was exhibited at Liverpool, bought by the Corporation of that city for £1,500, hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it now remains; and instantly took rank among the greatest masterpieces of modern art. “Fifty years hence,” said Sir Noel Paton, “it will be counted among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the world.”
The story of the last ten years of Rossetti’s private life, clouded by frequent ill-health, and disturbed by that most intolerable of a poet’s trials, a literary controversy, remains yet to be told by him who shared most intimately the seclusion and the affliction of that troublous period, Mr. Theodore Watts; whose oft-quoted sonnet to his friend, as Mr. Coulson Kernahan has said, gives a fuller picture of Rossetti than volumes of prose could do, and therefore commands insertion here:
“I told thee of an island, far and lone,