ROSSETTI AND HIS BURIED POEMS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18198, 19 March 1921, Page 13

ROSSETTI AND HIS BURIED POEMS.

The 10th of. Februaiw, 1862, was a day of tragedy for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the evening he had dined happily with his wife and his friend, Swinbiame, at a restaurant in Leicester Square, “after which Rossetti, who appeared as Well as usual, returned home with her husband. Dante Gabriel saw her to bed, and then went out to his class at the Working Men’s College. He returned home some time after 11 and found his wife insensible. and, on the table at her side, a ismall phial which had contained lauda■num. Four doctors were called in, but in spite of their endeavours she never recovered consciousness, and died about half past 7 in the morning.” —“The Most Supreme, Celestial Passion.” — Twelve too brief years gone since his eyes first fell on the beauty of Elizabeth Siddal, milliner's assistant turned model, as she posed in the studio of his friend, Walter Deverell. For 12 brief years he had worshipped her as man has seldom worshipped womad. She had been to him what Beatrice was to Dante, and Vittoria Colonna to Michael Angelo. He had immortalised her on scores of canvases, with the proud boast: Let ,all' men note . That in all years (0, Love, thy gift is this) They that would look on her must come to me. And he had written, for her eyes alone, a “century of sonnets,” enshrining the “most supreme, celestial passion ever recorded among men.” For less than two of these years he had enjoyed the “too long delayed rapture” of union with her. And now, when his cup of happiness was full to its brim,. it was dashed brutally, tragically, from his lips. The MSS. in the Coffin.— On the morning of the funeral he entered the room in which the body of his beloved lay and reverently placed, beneath the glory of her hair a small volume into which he had copied the poems his love of her had inspired. “M” brother, unwitnessed,” Mr W. M. Rossetti say's, “deposited the MSS. in the coffin. He* then informed Madox Brown of what he had done, saying, T have often been writing at those poems when Lizzie was ill and suffering, and I might have been attending to her; and now they shall go.’ Brown disapproved of such a sacrifice to a mere impulse of grief or time after 11 and found his wife insensremonstrate. I replied, ‘Well, the feeling does him honour, and let him do as he likes.’ ” Thus, when Rossetti’s “Beatrice” was laid to rest in High gate Cemetery, she took with her to the sanctuary and silence of the grave all the tributes of love her husband’s muse had laid at her feet in life.

During the years that followed his great loss, Rossetti sought a refuge from his grief in feverish work with his brushes; in collecting china; in his weird menagerie, ranging from wombats and armadillos to chameleons and kangaroos; and in the comradeship of devoted friends. But such distractions did little to lighten the burden of his sorrow. His heart was buried with his lost love; he longed for the day when “my spirit shall go hence to behold the glory of its lady—that blessed Beatrice.” And in his passionate yearning he sought long and vainly to get into touch with her by means of spiritualism. V —Seven Years.— Thus seven tortured years passed, while the poems his life-passion had inspired lay in the Highgate Cemetery in his dead lady’s keeping. Nor during all these years would he listen to the appeals and entreaties of his friends to recover them, to the enrichment of the world’s literature. “Various friends,” he • wrote to his brother William, on October 13, 1869, “have long hinted from time to time at the possibility of recovering my lost MSS. ; and when I was in Scotland last year Scott particularly referred to it. Some months ago Howell, of his own accord, entered on the matter, and offered to take all the execution of it on himself. This for some time I still hung back from accepting; but eventually I yielded, and the thing was done, after an order had been obtained from the Home Secretary, on Wednesday or Thursday last.” The Exhumation.— Thus it was that oik October night in 1863 a few of Rossetti’s friends made their way through the darkness to Highgate Cemetery, while he himself - remained at home, alone with his thoughts and memories. In awed silence, broken only by occasional whispers and the sound of digging, thev stood near the r?rave in a group, now lit up, now in shadow, as the flames of a fire flared or fell. When at last the coffin was raised and opened, “Beatrice’s” body, it is said, was revealed as beautiful in death as in life, her face peacefully pillowed on the small volume which she had guarded so long and faithfully. It was removed with infinite tenderness-from its sanctuary between her cheek and her still glorious hair; and Elizabeth Rossetti was reverently laid once more to her rest. “All in the coffin was found auite perfect,” Rossetti wrote a week later to his brother. A few months later—in the spring of 1870 : —the poems thus dramatically recovered from the grave were given to the world, and Elizabeth Rossetti became immortalised as “the heroine of the greatest sonnet-sequence in our language, save only that of Sh&keepeare.” _