By a careful treatment of him I procured him good nights, effecting this object chiefly by remaining at his bedside and draining my memory of every anecdote I had ever heard, and relating to him every amusing incident that I had encountered during life in my intercourse with the world.
Finding him so well recovered, I left him in the hands of his assistant and of my son, after an absence of many weeks.
Towards the end of the year—it was 1872—Rossetti, with my son, left Scotland and proceeded to Kelmscott Manorhouse, which he tenanted with his friend Mr. Morris. I visited him there, and found him in good health and spirits, after a journey spent, as I heard, with great joviality, the travellers taking a third-class carriage to themselves. He was already settled down to his art in a pleasant studio, loving to talk while he painted; at other times deep in the works of Dumas. In the afternoon he took vigorous walks in the meadows which one after another stretch out in front of the mansion.
The next day we went over the house and grounds. It is an old place, with its seven or rather twelve gables—such a sample of antiquity as you don’t meet with often. The windows are square casements with stone mullions, and the walls very thick. The garden has its yew-tree hedges, cut into fantastic shapes. The river is flooded like a lake, so that old Thames don’t know itself again. It is a most primitive village that surrounds the place—a few scattered free-stone habitations, some ivy-covered. There are no neighbours to interfere with the liberty of the subject.
George was a good boatman, and he often rowed me up the river, which half-way was spanned by an elegant arched bridge, and bounded further on by a weir. The scenery was very satisfying: on the left bank one overlooked a gay meadow, the cattle crowding to the bank to stare us out of sight; on the other side were lofty trees, while in midstream we had often to cut our way through islands of weed. The memory of this and of a later visit to the place was embodied in a poem, which I called “Reminiscence,” in which the scenery lives.
I found opportunities of talking with Rossetti about Mr. Theodore Watts, whose acquaintance I wished him to make more fully, for I had already introduced them to each other. While leading a country life Watts had not only acquired a knowledge of books, but had written poetry, and had thought out many literary problems for himself.
The Manorhouse was adequately furnished, but some exquisite chalk drawings, one especially, of female heads, gave it a charm. I thought that no one ever could paint a woman’s eyes like Rossetti. There was a softness, a delicacy, a life, a soul in them, never seen elsewhere but in living beings, and that how rarely!
Rossetti was unwilling to separate himself from George, and I consented to his retaining him as his secretary, for such a one was very necessary to him at that time.
I saw Mr. Morris at Kelmscott, and afterwards in society; he was inscrutable then, and has since been inscrutability in his career. W. B. Scott was also there, and when I left it was with him. Like his countrymen, he practised an exemplary carefulness in money matters, a habit which makes every Scotchman well off. In the train he counted his money with the dry remark, “One does not save anything by making a visit to a friend!”
A letter from my son George, dated December 19, 1875, written at Aldwich Lodge, Bognor, begins by a rejoicing to hear that I had accepted Rossetti’s invitation to spend Christmas with him at the seaside.