was delivering a long course of lectures at
Liverpool. The subject was prose fiction, and to fortify myself for the
work I was reading the masterpieces over again. Seeing this, Rossetti
suggested that I should read aloud, and I did so. Many an evening we
passed in this way. The farmhouse stood at the foot of a fell by the
side of the lowest pool of a ghyll, Fishers' Ghyll, and the roar of
falling waters could be heard from within. On the farther side of the
vale there were black crags where ravens lived, and in the unseen bed of
the dale between lay the dark waters of Thirlmere. The surroundings were
striking to the eye and ear in the daylight, but when night came, and
the lamp was lit, and the curtains were drawn, and darkness covered
everything outside, they were yet more impressive to the imagination. I
remember those evenings with gratitude and some pain. The little oblong
room, the dull thud of the ghyll like faint thunder overhead, the
crackle of the wood fire, myself reading aloud, and Rossetti in a long
sack painting coat, his hands thrust into its upright pockets, walking
with his heavy and uncertain step to and fro, to and fro, laughing
sometimes his big deep laugh, and sometimes sitting down to wipe his
moist spectacles and clear his dim eyes. The autumn was far spent, and
the nights were long. Not rarely the dead white gleams of the early dawn
before the coming of the sun met the yellow light of our candles as we
passed on the staircase going to bed a little window that looked up to
the mountains, and over them to the east.

[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI]

Perhaps it was not all pleasure, so far as I was concerned, but
certainly it was all profit. The novels we read were 'Tom Jones,' in
four volumes, and 'Clarissa,' in its original eight, one or two of
Smollett's, and some of Scott's. Rossetti had not, I think, been a great
reader of fiction, but his critical judgment was in some respects the
surest and soundest I have known. He was one of the only two men I have
ever met with who have given me in personal intercourse a sense of the
presence of a gift that is above and apart from talent--in a word, of
genius. Nothing escaped him. His alert mind seized upon everything. He
had never before, I think, given any thought to fiction as an art, but
his intellect played over it like a bright light. It amazes me now,
after ten years' close study of the methods of story-telling, to recall
the general principle