all the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method of composition only. A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about the period of _Hand and Soul_. It was to be entitled _St. Agnes of Intercession_, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at the beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had the manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet lay unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again to refresh my memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too inconclusive as to design to admit of any satisfying account of its plot, of which there is more, than in _Hand and Soul_. As far as it goes, it is the story of a young English painter who becomes the victim of a conviction that his soul has had a prior existence in this world. The hallucination takes entire possession of him, and so unsettles his life that he leaves England in search of relic or evidence of his spiritual “double.” Finally, in a picture-gallery abroad, he comes face to face with a portrait which’ he instantly recognises as the portrait of himself, both as he is now and as he was in the time of his antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait proves to be that of a distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work had long been the young Englishman’s guiding beacon in methods of art. Startled beyond measure at the singular discovery of a coincidence which, superstition apart, might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens to a fever. Here the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881, Rossetti gave me a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find myself without memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep record of his or of any man’s conversation), and my recollection of what passed is too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all respects finer than _Hand and Soul_, and the passage descriptive of the artist’s identification of his own personality in the portrait on the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque, impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that it would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how many of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.