Among Mrs. Rossetti’s accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly from imaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingled emotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of ’73, when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us all sorts of things. And writing these words makes me hear those readings again—makes me hear, through the open casement of the quaint old house, the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music of that half-Italian, half-English voice. To have been admitted into such a charmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life. It is something for a man to have lived within touch of Christina Rossetti and her mother. From her father, however, Christina took, either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early association with the author of ‘Il Mistero dell’ Amor Platonico del Medio Evo’ and ‘La Beatrice di Dante,’ that passion for symbolism which is one of the chief features of her poetry. There is, perhaps, no more striking instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics descend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited by Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father. While Christina’s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical, she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the every-day incidents of life. Gabriel, on the contrary, though using symbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinct for symbolizing his own life to pass into positive superstition. When a party of us—including Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake, with four of his sons, and myself—were staying for Christmas with Gabriel near Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm. While Gabriel seemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whose poetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion. Yet Gabriel could speak of his father’s symbolizing (as in ‘La Beatrice di Dante’) as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless. This is remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to read those extraordinary works of the elder Rossetti’s without being impressed by the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar.