At Birchington he reverted also to his picture of ten years back, “Proserpine.” His last poetry was written less than a week before his death, in two sonnets illustrative of his yet unfinished picture, “The Question,” or “The Sphinx,” in which the figures of Youth, Manhood, and Age appear before the Mother of Mystery. Early in youth Rossetti had made a resolution that no day should pass without some piece of work, however imperfect, issuing from his hands, and amid much pain and weakness, sorrow and discouragement, he kept that resolution almost till his dying day.
On Good Friday, the 7th of April, he became rapidly worse, but remained cheerful and composed. On Easter Day the shadow of death hung over the little household. In the evening the group of watchers gathered with increasing apprehension round the bed. “I think I shall die to-night,” said Rossetti quietly, some hours before the end. Soon after nine o’clock a momentary struggle gave warning of the approaching rest. His mother, sister, and brother, Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. Shields, Mr. Hall Caine, Dr. Harris and the nurse were with him, when, twenty minutes later, he passed away, meeting the Deliverer in perfect calm; seeing, as he himself expressed it, “on Death’s dark storm the rainbow of the soul.”
On Easter Monday Mr. Shields, at the request of the bereaved family, made a careful and accurate pencil drawing of the head of his late friend as he lay ready for the last sad rites. A plaster cast of the head, by Brucciani, was also made, but was not considered satisfactory.
It was decided that the funeral should take place at Birchington; and there, in the quiet little graveyard on the cliffs, Rossetti was laid to rest. Mr. William Sharp and Philip Bourke Marston (who died five years later) were among the mourners, besides those already gathered in the house of grief.
The quiet hamlet of Birchington-on-Sea is now a well-loved place of pilgrimage. The quaint, un-English-looking house in which the poet-painter died is honoured as “Rossetti Bungalow.” In the old, shingle-towered, ivy-grown church, a stained-glass memorial window, his mother’s gift, shows, in the one light, his own design, “The Passover in the Holy Family,” and, in the other, Christ giving sight to a blind minstrel,—the work of his old friend, Mr. Shields. In the churchyard, opposite the south-west porch, the old verger shows, with touching pride and enthusiasm, a beautiful Runic cross, on the face of which is this inscription:
HERE SLEEPS
GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE ROSSETTI,
HONOURED UNDER THE NAME OF
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,
AMONG PAINTERS AS A PAINTER,