hat
tears so frequently filled his eyes, and sobs rose to his throat when he
recited the lines beginning

O sleep! it is a gentle thing--

affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been
written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:

About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
leading point about his work is its human love, and the
leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
(_mountains_ of it I don't want to heap) has chiefly been
livelihood necessity. I 'll copy the sonnet on opposite
page, only I 'd rather you kept it to yourself. _Five_ years
of _good_ poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
know.

His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.

Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
Once in long leagues--even such the scarce-snatched hours
Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:--
Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
Own them, a beacon to our centuries.

As a minor point I called Rossetti's attention to the fact that
Coleridge lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic
career really extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth
line was amended to

Six years from sixty saved.

I doubted if "deepening pain" could be charged with the whole burden
of Coleridge's constitutional procrastination, and to this objection
Rossetti replied:

Line eleven in my first reading was "deepening _sloth_;" but
it seemed harsh--and--damn it all! much too like the spirit
of Banquo!

Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him
also as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti's favour