“Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,” ending with the despairing cry upon the deaf goddess of repose— “O Night, Night, Night! art thou not known to me, A thicket hung with masks of mockery, And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears?” Many such nights Rossetti bore, we may well believe, before he fled at last, when rational means seemed of no avail against his malady, to that most dangerous source of ease, the too free use of chloral. Several times he partially shook off the habit, and intervals of comparative comfort and cheerfulness were frequent until 1872, when other phases of illness, independent of it though still of nervous origin, further undermined the constitution already weakened by years of abnormal strain. A respite of a very pleasant kind was afforded him in the successive autumns of 1868–69 by his visits to Miss Boyd at Penkill, in Perthshire, where, in company with other congenial spirits, he spent some weeks of comparative happiness and ease. Here he was induced to resume his poetry, which, save for a few significant sonnets, had lain in abeyance since that sad day on which he had buried his manuscripts in the grave of his early love. Now, yielding with much reluctance and conflict of heart to the persuasion of friends who knew the value of the poems thus lost to literature, he gave permission for the coffin to be exhumed, and the manuscripts removed. The story of this delicate task, and of its judicious and successful fulfilment under the personal superintendence of two or three intimate friends of the widower, has already been related in detail by one of the eye-witnesses aforesaid. The poems, after seven years’ concealment in the quiet grave in Highgate Cemetery, were duly restored to their author’s hand. This having been done, he set to work arranging, re-writing, and adding some of the finest work of his poetic maturity to a collection of poems which should be an immortal record and perpetuation of his love.