OSCAR WILDE’S STORY OF ROSETTI’S WIFE.

Waipawa Mail, Volume 5, Issue 469, 13 March 1883, Page 3

OSCAR WILDE’S STORY OF ROSETTI’S WIFE.

At my request, says a writer in a contemporary, Mr Wilde repeated the story he had told in Boston to the poet John Boyle O’Reilly’s guests, of Rosetti’s wife—a beautiful woman, with a wonderful glory of red gold hair, who had entered his life to mould and colour it with her love, and to shape all his work. One day, in the act of raising a Venetian glass filled with wine to her lips, she died. No one knew why. With her life passed away all his interest and his hopes, and the sonnets which he felt to be her work as much as his, he put into a leaden casket and had buried with her in her coffin. Some years after, his friends begged that he would restore to the world the poems, and, at last, they prevailed upon him to allow them to be taken from the grave. To do this they applied to Mr Bruce (a secretary and the authority, I suppose) who, Mr Wilde humorously said, could understand a thing that was an export or an import, or that had a name on the stock exchange, but to whom the word poet conveyed nothing, and was lost in amused astonishment that any one could think that a poet’s words could confer honor upon England. However, in the end permission was given, the grave was opened, the coffin lid raised, and behold, the beautiful red hair had grown to a great length, and wound about her grave-robe ; the leaden casket had broken by the weight of the earth upon it, and the wonderful hair had grown in and around the sonnets, and made a lace-like mesh on every page.