t Mr. Watts's opinion upon a matter of poetical
criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking
instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard
and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his
day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me
an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he
read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it
himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On
my asking him why, he said:

"Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
without it."

"Well, but you like it yourself," said I.

"Yes," he replied; "but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel
that Watts must be right."

And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in
question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the
sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
Watts took the view (to Rossetti's great vexation at first) that this
sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic
point of view, was "out of place and altogether incongruous in a group
of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_," and Rossetti
gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to
Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.

In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought
"Christabel" really existed as a mediaeval name, or existed at all
earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier
than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge's granddaughter must
have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem
appear to belong to another family of names,--names with a different
origin and range of expression,--Leoline, Geraldine, Roland, and most
of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented
the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from
Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about
the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a
kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth,
it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another
conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved