The story of the last ten years of Rossetti’s private life, clouded by frequent ill-health, and disturbed by that most intolerable of a poet’s trials, a literary controversy, remains yet to be told by him who shared most intimately the seclusion and the affliction of that troublous period, Mr. Theodore Watts; whose oft-quoted sonnet to his friend, as Mr. Coulson Kernahan has said, gives a fuller picture of Rossetti than volumes of prose could do, and therefore commands insertion here: “I told thee of an island, far and lone, Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break In spray of music, and the breezes shake O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone, While that sweet music echoes like a moan In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake, Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake, A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne. Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore Struck golden song, as from the strand of day: For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay— Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core, Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play Around thy lonely island evermore.” The mingled pain and privilege of Mr. Watts’s ministry was shared to a great degree by Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Dr. Gordon Hake and his son, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. Frederick Shields, and Mr. Sandys. Mr. Leyland also saw him frequently, and added generous and unremitting friendship to his patronage of the wayward painter’s work. He was the purchaser of some of the most important pictures of Rossetti’s last decade, including the beautiful “Dis Manibus,” or “The Roman Widow,” (1874), which remains unsurpassed for delicate purity and depth of colour by any of the masterpieces of his prime; “Mnemosyne,” or “La Ricordanza,” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1876–78), one of his most noble and impressive symbolic figures; “The Sea-Spell,” (1875–77), and a replica of “The Blessed Damozel” (1873–77), which he painted for Mr. William Graham in illustration of his own poem: “The Blessed Damozel leaned out From the gold bar of heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depths Of water stilled at even: She had three lilies in her hand And the stars in her hair were seven.”