o show--probably a good deal added to the old
vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
longer poem by itself. _The House of Life_, when next
issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
should like to see the passage on _Jenny_ which you have not
yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of _Hand
and Soul_ (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
all unsurmised open gradually in the mind--a sort of
spiritual _Turner_, among whose hills one ranges and in
whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
including this story in next issue of poems, but am
uncertain. What think you?

It seemed certain that _Hand and Soul_ ought not to continue to lie in
the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught
else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of
the author's works. I could see no natural objection on the score of
its being written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said,
prose is not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand
over-against each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast:
"Confusion to the man who took the poetry out of the moon," but prose
and poetry surely are or may be practically one. We know that in
rhythmic flow they sometimes come very close together, and nowhere
closer than in the heightened prose and the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic
prose may not be the best prose, just as (to use a false antithesis)
dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no natural antagonism
between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided always that the
spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself constantly urged
that in prose the first necessity was that it should be direct, and he
knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was written in
proseman's dic