entator the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be
totally unjust, even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to
allow the impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the
external form to the inward substance of poetry. This charge was
brought against him, as it has always been brought against earnest
students of poetic art. I will rather quote a few words from a letter
of Rossetti to me, written in 1873, when he was composing his own
_magnum opus_ of "Rose Mary." I have always felt them to be very
salutary, none the less because it is obvious that the writer did not
at all times contrive, or perhaps desire, to make them true in his own
work:

"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be
as _amusing_ (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class
of literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it
alive can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out
of travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably,
observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing
all themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no
margin for discursiveness."

During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was
clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament--sleeplessness.
To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and
concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new
drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its
effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more
necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and
excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in
which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much, chloral as
Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally
a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily
that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the
victim's intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote
brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his
death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature
powers. There is something almost melancholy in such a proof of the
superior vitality of the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of
the body, the insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to
secure th