In the autumn of 1881, which witnessed the publication of his second volume of original poetry, Rossetti went with his friend Mr. Hall Caine, the eminent novelist, to spend some weeks at a little farmhouse in the Vale of St. John, near Keswick, Cumberland. The surrounding scenery was of a wildly beautiful kind, well calculated to soothe and inspire the city-pent poets; but Rossetti was by this time too ill to find relief from nervous strain in the long walks which he had enjoyed at Bognor. He paced instead, for hours together, the quaint little sitting-room where, night after night, he would read aloud from the treasures of modern fiction. Of Rossetti’s acute critical faculty, and his sound literary judgment alike in poetry and prose romance, abundant testimony has been given by the many privileged to enjoy from year to year, especially in the period of his prime, the inestimable help and delight of his enthusiastic counsel and his frank, outspoken, but never ungenerous criticism. Such witness is fully endorsed by Mr. Caine’s records even of this last autumn of his life, when, through shattered health and failing hopes for his own future, he retained in a great measure the mental vision and acumen of happier days, as well as his own creative power in design and poetry. Rossetti never tired of these nightly discussions of the inexhaustible topics of literary art: he loved to prolong them far into the morning hours; and often, as his friend has told us, they saw the sunrise break over the great hills as they went at last to rest. Nor was the year without fruit in painting. The pathetic picture of “La Pia,” a new design in oils, though with a title used for a sketch in 1867, ranks high among his later performances. The subject, briefly broached in Dante’s “Purgatorio,” deals with the imprisonment of the young wife of Nello dell’ Pietra of Siena in a fortress in the Maremma, in the midst of a noxious swamp. Rossetti was still at work, too, upon the great symbolic picture in which he was endeavouring to sum up all that he had implied in his maturer treatment of womanly beauty,—the mystic and solemn “Venus Astarte” or “Astarte Syriaca” (the Syrian Venus). The “Cassandra” proposed by him somewhile previously was never far advanced, but he had painted in 1880 a somewhat inferior oil version of a subject which had been the favourite of his youth, “The Salutation of Beatrice.” One of the very few public triumphs which came to Rossetti in his lifetime stands in the annals of 1881. His great picture, “Dante’s Dream,” painted ten years earlier, was purchased by the Corporation of Liverpool for £1,500, and hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it was at once hailed with general and almost unalloyed praise.