July 8, 1892. To lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Watts, Little Holland House, Melbourne Road, Kensington. Found them waiting for us in the drawing-room. She was a Miss Gordon Cumming. Watts is a man of perhaps seventy-six, slender, small, deaf in one ear. Keen blue eyes, fine teeth, the rest of him a delicate and dignified wreck. He was oddly dressed in a little claret-colored skullcap, a brown coat, very old, canvas shoes, unlaced, and linen ruffles at his wrists instead of cuffs. His presence was a benediction. The gentleness, the otherworldliness, the purity and spirituality of the great little man brought tears to my eyes. He made me think of Mr. Emerson, and a little of Papa, at the end. We lunched in a room filled with pictures and portraits and afterwards went into the gallery, thrown open to the public Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The “Life and Love”, a picture I always liked, grows on one. “I think of giving this to America,” Watts said, “it may have a lesson for your country. Life is a poor thing at best, toiling up a steep, rough path, and unless helped by Love, not worth having. Love does not lift the burden from Life, nor give it very much support, but touches it gently, tenderly, and makes the stony path endurable.” I admired a portrait of Mrs. Langtry. “I call it the Dean’s Daughter,” he said. “She came in one day in a simple little bonnet and dress. There was a feather in the bonnet that I asked her to take out. Then I painted her just as she was.” The portrait is a perfect, womanly thing. Not the professional beauty, the actress, or the pleasure-loving woman the world knows, just the sweet loveliness of the Dean’s Daughter. “There is something very good about her,” he said. Remembering her smile, which kept the childlike quality and the brightness of sunshine, I understood. A portrait of Lord Tennyson is among his latest work. During one of the sittings, Tennyson said to Watts: “If John Keats had lived he would have been the greatest of the English poets.” Watts’ very latest portrait of Walter Crane is in his most vigorous manner. It is painted in soft tones, face, coat, hair, background, all a mellow range of browns. The expression is characteristic, a really superb portrait. It reminded me of the day when Crane lunched with us in Beacon Street, and I tried to dissuade him from going to speak at an anarchistic sort of a meeting at Boston Music Hall. “As I do not sell my pictures,” Watts said, “I feel that I have the right to carry out an idea in many ways.” This _a propos_ of a subject he has treated several times, the “Angel of Death.”