In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’s influence in his critical estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On my asking him why, he said: “Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better without it.” “Well, but you like it yourself,” said I. “Yes,” he replied; “but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel that Watts must be right.” And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr. Watts took the view (to Rossetti’s great vexation at first) that this sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic point of view, was “out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_,” and Rossetti gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.