Rossetti’s topic was still “Old Souls;” Scott was his echo. They said it was a subject that could never be written on again.
At this date Rossetti’s poems were passing through the press, and I had a bundle of verse myself ready for it.
I was very much moved by the contents of Rossetti’s volume. I still admire it much, but with a severer criticism than then.
I could say much of Rossetti’s later life, but am compelled to omit all such details, for they are intimately mixed up with illness, which to a physician the witness of it, is sacred ground. Then again, friends are bad biographers, because they know too much and cannot shape the character to that ideal which those personally unknown to a great poet might expect.
Rossetti’s intellectual force was not of a striking order, but it was adequate; his charm lay in the artistic colouring of his mind, arrayed as it was in the fascinations of a Provençal attire. This is very different to the charm in which Nature invests her lovers; and yet it is so bewitching as to claim a rivalry, and to almost appear the subject of her inspirations in some enchanted guise.
I had heard that paintings were leaving Cheyne Walk, such as in colouring had not been seen since Titian lived; and, with a claim on his acquaintance, I was induced to visit him.
What Reynolds’s faded works once were we no longer know, but when I saw Rossetti’s paintings I was reminded of what was said of one—the Infant Hercules, sent to Russia—that it looked as if it had been boiled in brandy.
It is a pleasure to me to think that I was once a comfort to Rossetti in his trying illness. I went to him on his summoning me to Scotland. I passed six weeks with him there; first at Stobbs Hall, afterwards outside Crieff, to which place, among others, I travelled to find him a suitable abode. I walked with him by day, I sat at his bedside by night, relating to him the history of almost every one I had ever known, and by diverting his mind from itself, I left him comparatively restored.