your brain has
meanwhile been breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark
corner. You have only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these
things away." But continuing for some moments longer in the same strain,
he came to closer quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three
or four men who had throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of
him since his death in words of admiration and even affection, and who
had for a time fallen away from him or called on him but rarely, from
contingencies due to any cause but alienated friendship.

At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
"You are to sleep in Watts's room to-night," he said: and then in reply
to a look of inquiry he added, "He comes here at least twice a week,
talking until four o'clock in the morning upon everything from poetry
to the Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney
Hill, it is necessary to have a bed for him." Before going into my room
he suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from
another and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast
room. The outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering
chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and
from the rustle of trees against the window-pane one perceived that it
overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings
around the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before
the windows, so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light
it, and our voices sounded thick and muffled. An enormous black oak
chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix on the largest
of its ledges, covered a part of one side and reached to the ceiling.
Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a bedroom, occupied places about
the floor: and in the middle of it, and before a little couch, stood
a small table on which was a wire lantern containing a candle which
Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand--another candle meantime
lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all night.
He said that was so. "My curse," he added, "is insomnia. Two or three
hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pass away a
weary hour, read this book"--a volume of Boswell's _Johnson_ which I
noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not
escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and label