Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/143

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 295 Rossetti, Painter," and in i860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years, Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a gal- axy of talent in poetry and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius. But all this while the world outside knew nothing of the matter. One by one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured the plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of general reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far preferring to be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself a public part. To this determination several outward things engaged him still further. He married quite early in life ; and his wife, who was herself an artist of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent, bore him a son who died at birth, and then shortly after died herself. During his brief married months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his poems, and thought to publish them.; but when he lost his wife, in a paroxysm of grief he placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and would hear no more a suggestion of pub- lication. In 1861 he presented the world with a very learned and beautiful an- thology of early Italian poetry, and proposed as early as that year to print his original poems. It was his scheme to name the little volume " Dante in Verona, and other Poems ;" but it came to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of publica- tion again took possession of him. I have been told that a sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact that he found himself in his fortieth year, led him to con- quer his scruples, and finally arrange his pieces. But he was singularly fastidi- ous ; the arrangement would never please him ; the cover must be cut in brass, the paper at the sides must bear a special design. These niceties were rarer twelve years ago than they are now, and the printers fatigued him with their per- sistent obstinacy. It was not till early in 1870 that the " Poems " in stately form first appeared, and were hailed with a shout of admiration which was practically universal. It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes these lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on my mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbe ; the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then usual to say — to my thinking more like that of Chau- cer — in any case a head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets ; they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell- like tone and sonority, a voice capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its absence 01 rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own studio the unfinished MS. of