the lecture I have learned to know it,
I feel no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses
animating his work should have been of all things the most likely to
engage his affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation
that he had ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the
establishment of a school of poetry, and contended that, in common with
his colleagues, he had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating
the best examples of Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout
the period of my acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from
classification with the poetry of aestheticism, and aspired to the fame
of a poet who had been prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual
emotions, and to whom the sensations of the body were as naught, unless
they were sanctified by the concurrence of the soul. My lecture was
printed, but quite a year elapsed after its preparation before
it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might derive a moment's
gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one ardent upholder
and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length I sent him a
copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A post or two
later brought me the following reply:

Dear Mr. Caine,--

I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in
your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.
Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such
as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I
believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You
say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am
grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and
unfalteringly for the work you love.

I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very
glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of
calling, to give me a day's notice when to expect you, as I
am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The
afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about
9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,

D. G. Rossetti.

This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from
Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the
following supplementary note reached me:

I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a
distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should