*** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the letters printed in this volume, for not only would the difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production. It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in the years 1879,1880, and 1881. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Gabriele Rossetti--Boyhood--The pre-Raphaelite Movement--Early Manhood--The Blessed Damozel--Jenny--Sister Helen--The Translations--The House of Life--The Germ--Oxford and Cambridge Magazine--Blackfriars Bridge--Married Life CHAPTER II. Chelsea--Chloral--Dante’s Dream--Recovery of the Poems--Poems--The Contemporary Controversy--Mr. Theodore Watts--Rose Mary--The White Ship--The King’s Tragedy--Poetic Continuations--Cloud Confines--Journalistic Slanders CHAPTER III. Early Intercourse--Poetic Impulses--Beginning of Correspondence--Early Letters CHAPTER IV. Inedited Poems--Inedited Ballads--Additions to Sister Helen--Hand and Soul--St. Agnes of Intercession--Catholic Opinion--Rossetti’s Catholicism--Cloud Confines--The Portrait CHAPTER V. Coleridge--Wordsworth--Lamb and Coleridge--Charles Wells--Keats--Leigh Hunt and Keats--Keats’s Sister CHAPTER VI. Chatterton--Oliver Madox Brown--Gilchrist’s Blake--George Gilfillan--Old Periodicals--A Rustic Poet--Art and Politics--Letters in Biography CHAPTER VII. Cheyne Walk--The House--First Meeting--Rossetti’s Personality--His Reading--The Painter’s Craft--Mr. Ruskin--Rossetti’s Sensitiveness--His Garden--His Library CHAPTER VIII. English Sonnets--Sonnet Structure--Shakspeare’s Sonnets--Wells’s Sonnet--Charles Whitehead--Ebenezer Jones--Mr. W. M. Rossetti--A New Sonnet--Mr. W. Davies--Canon Dixon--Miss Christina Rossetti--The Bride’s Prelude--The Supernatural in Poetry CHAPTER IX. Last Days--Vale of St John--In the Lake Country--Return to London--London--Birchington RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI CHAPTER I.