At Birchington-on-Sea one of the most rarely gifted men of our time has just died [April 9th, 1882] after a lingering illness. During the time that his ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ was passing through the press last autumn his health began to give way, and he left London for Cumberland. A stay of a few weeks in the Vale of St. John, however, did nothing to improve his health, and he returned much shattered. After a time a numbness in the left arm excited fear of paralysis, and he became dangerously ill. It is probable, indeed, that nothing but the skill and unwearied attention of Mr. John Marshall saved his life then, as it had done upon several previous occasions. Such of his friends as were then in London—W. B. Scott, Burne Jones, Leyland, F. Shields, Mr. Dunn, and others—feeling the greatest alarm, showed him every affectionate attention, and spared no effort to preserve a life so precious and so beloved. Mr. Seddon having placed at his disposal West Cliff Bungalow, Birchington-on-Sea, he went thither, accompanied by his mother and sister and Mr. Hall Caine, about nine weeks since, but received no benefit from the change, and, gradually sinking from a complication of disorders, he died on Sunday last at 10 P.M. [Picture: Dante Gabriel Rosette. From a crayon-drawing by himself reproduced by the kind permission of Mrs. W. M. Rossetti] Were I even competent to enter upon the discussion of Rossetti’s gifts as a poet and as a painter, it would not be possible to do so here and at this moment. That the quality of romantic imagination informs with more vitality his work than it can be said to inform the work of any of his contemporaries was recognized at first by the few, and is now (judging from the great popularity of his last volume of poetry) being recognized by the many. And the same, I think, may be said of his painting. Those who had the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him knew how “of imagination all compact” he was. Imagination, indeed, was at once his blessing and his bane. To see too vividly—to love too intensely—to suffer and enjoy too acutely—is the doom, no doubt, of all those “lost wanderers from Arden” who, according to the Rosicrucian story, sing the world’s songs; and to Rossetti this applies more, perhaps, than to most poets. And when we consider that the one quality in all poetry which really gives it an endurance outlasting the generation of its birth is neither music nor colour, nor even intellectual substance, but the clearness of the seeing; the living breath of imagination—the very qualities, in short, for which such poems as ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose Mary’ are so conspicuous—we are driven to the conclusion that Rossetti’s poetry has a long and enduring future before it.