it seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural “incarnation of the thought,” the poet’s imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains of the prose expression, escapes with great difficulty. An instance of this occurred in Rossetti’s own experience. During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to the peculiar effect of the moon’s disc reflected in the white surf, and compared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards—shortly before his death, in fact—when he came to write ‘The King’s Tragedy,’ remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it in the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seashore and listens to her prophecies of doom. But he was at once confronted by this obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf been rendered in the prose note—so entirely did the prose matter seem to be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought—that it appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction proper to poetry. It was only after much labour—a labour greater than he had given to all the previous stanzas combined—that he succeeded in freeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting the picture in these words:— That eve was clenched for a boding storm ’Neath a toilsome moon half seen; The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; And where there was a line of sky, Wild wings loomed dark between. * * * * ’Twas then the moon sailed clear of the rack On high on her hollow dome; And still as aloft with hoary crest Each clamorous wave rang home, Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed Amid the champing foam. And the remark was then made to him with regard to Coleridge’s ‘Wanderings of Cain,’ that it is not unlikely the matchless fragment given in Coleridge’s poems might have passed nearer towards completion, or at least towards the completion of the first part, had it not been for those elaborate and beautiful prose notes which he has left behind.