The first and highest is that where the work has been all mentally "cartooned," as it were, beforehand by a process intensely conscious, but patient and silent--an occult evolution of life: then follows the glory of wielding words, and we see the hand of Dante, as the hand of Michelangelo--or almost as that quickening hand which Michelangelo has dared to embody--sweep from left to right, fiery and final. In 1862, Rossetti took possession of his famous house, 10 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived to the end of his life, and whose joint occupants were, for a certain length of time, George Meredith, Swinburne and William Michael Rossetti, who left the house in 1874, the year in which he married Lucy Madox Brown. That four men of individualities so utterly different, and, in some senses, aggressive, or at least assertive, should have been able to live together in closeness of continuous intimacy, from which there was hardly an escape, was barely conceivable. Yet it was in this house that Swinburne wrote many of his _Poems Ballads_, part of his book on Blake and his masterpiece, _Atalanta in Calydon._ There Meredith finished his masterpiece in the matter of tragic and passionate verse, _Modern Love._ There is nothing like it in the whole of English poetry, nor did he ever achieve so magnificent a vivisection of the heart in verse as in these pages--in which he created a wonderful style, acid, stinging, bitter-sweet, poignant--where these self-torturing and cruel lovers weave the amazing web of their disillusions as they struggle, open-eyed, against the blindness of passion. The poem laughs while it cries. Swinburne, who was, I think, on the whole, less susceptible in regard to abusive attacks on his books than Meredith or Rossetti, vindicates himself, and superbly, in the pamphlet I have before me: _Notes on Poems and Reviews_ (1866). He has been accused of indecency and immorality and perversity; and is amazed to find that _Anactoria_ "has excited, among the chaste and candid critics of the day, or hour, or minute, a more vehement reputation, a more virtuous horror, a more passionate appeal, than any other of my writing. I am evidently not virtuous enough to understand them. I thank Heaven that I am not. _Ma corruption rougirait de leur pudeur._"