and had
the manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet
lay unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again
to refresh my memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too
inconclusive as to design to admit of any satisfying account of its
plot, of which there is more, than in _Hand and Soul_. As far as it
goes, it is the story of a young English painter who becomes the victim
of a conviction that his soul has had a prior existence in this world.
The hallucination takes entire possession of him, and so unsettles
his life that he leaves England in search of relic or evidence of his
spiritual "double." Finally, in a picture-gallery abroad, he comes face
to face with a portrait which' he instantly recognises as the portrait
of himself, both as he is now and as he was in the time of his
antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait proves to be that of a
distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work had long been the young
Englishman's guiding beacon in methods of art. Startled beyond measure
at the singular discovery of a coincidence which, superstition apart,
might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens to a fever. Here
the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881, Rossetti gave me
a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find myself without
memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep record of his
or of any man's conversation), and my recollection of what passed is
too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt
to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all
respects finer than _Hand and Soul_, and the passage descriptive of the
artist's identification of his own personality in the portrait on
the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,
impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one
occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his
enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that
it would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how
many of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.

* Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti's
habits, he certainly never enjoyed any "rivers of morning
air" at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
darkened bedchamber.

One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets
living and