With such talk we passed the Christmas night of 1881. Rossetti recovered power in some measure, was able to get down to the studio, and see the friends who called—Mr. F. E. Leyland frequently, Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Mr. Boyce, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. Gilchrist, Mr. and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. Coronio, and Mr. C. and Mr. A. Ionides occasionally, as well as those previously named. A visit from Dr. Hueffer of the Times (of whose gifts he had a high opinion), enlivened him perceptibly. But he did not recover, and at the end of January 1882 it was definitely determined that he should go to the sea-side. I was asked to accompany him, and did so. At the right juncture Mr. J. P. Seddon very hospitably tendered the use of his handsome bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea, a little watering-place four miles west of Margate. There we spent nine weeks. At first going out he was able to take short walks on the cliffs, or round the road that winds about the churchyard, but his strength grew less and less every day and hour. We were constantly visited by Mr. Watts, whose devotion never failed, and Rossetti would brighten up at the prospect of one of his visits, and become sensibly depressed when he had gone. Mr. William Sharp, too (a young friend of whose gifts as a poet Rossetti had a genuine appreciation, and by whom he had been visited at intervals for some time), came out occasionally and cheered up the sufferer in a noticeable degree. Then his mother and sister came and stayed in the house during many weeks at the last. How shall I speak of the tenderness of their solicitude, of their unwearying attentions, in a word of their ardent and reciprocated love of the illustrious son and brother for whom they did the thousand gentle offices which they alone could have done! The end was drawing on, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before) of the length of The White Ship, called Jan Van Hunks, embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman’s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Watts, a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest strange and strong.
About this time he derived great gratification from reading an article on him and his works in Le Livre by Mr. Joseph Knight, an old friend to whom he was deeply attached, and for whose gifts he had a genuine admiration. Perhaps the very last letter Rossetti penned was written to Mr. Knight upon the subject of this article.
His intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and freer than ever of hallucinations. But his bodily strength grew less and less. His sight became feebler, and then he abandoned the many novels that had recently solaced his idler hours, and Miss Rossetti read aloud to him. Among other books she read Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, and he seemed deeply touched by Sidney Carton’s sacrifice, and remarked that he would like to paint the last scene of the story.
On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called The Sphinx, and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that cause hardly intelligible. It chanced that I had just been reading Mr. Buchanan’s new volume of poems, and in the course of conversation I told him the story of the ballad called The Lights of Leith, and he was affected by the pathos of it. He had heard of that author’s retractation{*} of the charges involved in the article published ten years earlier, and was manifestly touched by the dedication of the romance God and the Man. He talked long and earnestly that morning, and it was our last real interview. He spoke of his love of early English ballad literature, and of how when he first met with it he had said to himself: “There lies your line.”
* The retractation, which now has a peculiar literary
interest, was made in the following verses, and should, I
think, be recorded here:
To an old Enemy.
I would have snatch’d a bay-leaf from thy brow,
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and charity I bring thee now
A lily-flower instead.
Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me!
In a later edition of the romance the following verses are
added to the dedication:
To Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
Calmly, thy royal robe of death around thee,
Thou Bleekest, and weeping brethren round thee stand—
Gently they placed, ere yet God’s angel crown’d thee,
My lily in thy hand!
I never knew thee living, O my brother!
But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
And by that token, we shall know each other,
When God’s voice saith “Arise!”
“Can you understand me?” he asked abruptly, alluding to the thickness of his utterance.
“Perfectly.”
“Nurse Abrey cannot: what a good creature she is!”
That night we telegraphed to Mr. Marshall, to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr. Watts, and wrote next morning to Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Madox Brown. It had been found by the resident medical man, Dr. Harris, that in Rossetti’s case kidney disease had supervened. His dear mother and I sat up until early morning with him, and when we left him his sister took our place and remained with him the whole of that and subsequent nights. He sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of stupefaction had removed all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry. “My own verses torment me,” he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited, snatches from one of Iago’s songs in Othello. “Strange things,” he murmured, “to come into one’s head at such a moment.” I told him his brother and Mr. Watts would be with him to-morrow. “Then you really think that I am dying? At last you think so; but I was right from the first.”
Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was, he was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall arrived.