I sometimes look at the bottom of an antique silver snuff-box, a reservoir more than two hundred years old, the lid of elephant’s tooth, and I read—
“T. G. H.,
from
D. G. R.,
1875.”
A memorial to me of better things than an old-fashioned Christmas gathering.
And I use this snuff-reservoir every day; it affords me nasal recreation.
Snuff-taking did not go out with the pigtails, but it is on the wane; it has given way to smoking: and diminished is the number of gifts, such graceful objects for monarchs to present to men like myself—if they did but know me!—of platinum or golden boxes set in diamonds. And would you know the reason of my persistence in taking snuff? It not only wakes up that torpor so prevalent between the nose and the brain, making the wings of an idea uncurl like those of a new-born butterfly, but while others sneeze, and run at the eyes and nose, my schneiderian membrane is impervious to weather, or, to be explicit, I never take cold in my head.
Bath was my tarrying-place when Rossetti’s invitation came to me, and I went to Bognor. The great poet-painter occupied a commodious villa and grounds in a lane, west of the town, and near to the roughest bit of beach on the Sussex coast.
Rossetti had packed his house. Mrs. Rossetti, the mother; Miss Maria and Miss Christina, the sisters; Misses Polidori, who were the aunts; and Watts, who was the friend, were there, together with my sons, Edmund and Henry, for the festive week. The villa had good rooms; upstairs was a gallery with bedchambers on both sides, and ending in a large apartment which became a studio. There Rossetti worked, and liked to be read to while he improved his canvas, till the afternoon, when he took a violent walk over the boulders by the sea, towards Selsey Bay, among the ruined wooden groynes which had become seaweed gardens, hideous of aspect, as if invented and laid out by fish made man.
I walked with Rossetti daily over this penal shore, reflecting on absent pleasure, he unconscious of present pain. He talked but little while his feet crunched the boulders, and took no heed of the aspects of the scene, but seemed to be stamping health out of what was left unused for the six days’ creation.
Mrs. Rossetti was a sweet lady, and Christina, who still lives, a higher poet than her brother, is of the noblest brand. The family, one and all, are almost purely Italian. The father, a poet, was a Neapolitan; the mother was a Tuscan, with some Scotch blood. Rossetti may be regarded, not as English, but as one of those powerful leavens with which the genius of one country sometimes ferments that of another, to give it a new vitality.
Watts, who was now on terms of brotherly intimacy with him, bore him through any passing difficulties that needed only better guidance than his own.