And if the attempt to turn prose into poetry is hopeless, the attempt to turn poetry into prose is no less so, and for a like reason—that of the immense difficulty of passing from the movement natural to one mood into the movement natural to another. And this criticism applies especially to the poetry of Rossetti, which produces so many of its best effects by means not of logical statement, but of the music and suggestive richness of rhythmical language. That Rossetti did on some occasions, when told that his sonnets were unintelligible, talk about making such a paraphrase himself is indisputable, because Mr. Fairfax Murray say that he heard him say so. But indisputable also is many another saying of Rossetti’s, equally ill-considered and equally impracticable. That he ever seriously thought of doing so is most unlikely. III. In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makes mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:— “It [the ballad] is most fully worthy of publication, but has not been included in Rossetti’s ‘Collected Works,’ because he gave the MS. to his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public.” And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in my possession. With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend William Rossetti has here brought me into trouble. Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters—some of them cordial enough, but others far from cordial—asking, or rather demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti’s have for so long a period been withheld from the public. In order to explain the delay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine’s picturesque ‘Recollections of Rossetti,’ published in 1882:— “The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before), of the length of ‘The White Ship,’ called ‘Jan Van Hunks,’ embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman’s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts, a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest, strange and strong.”