Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/135

 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 261 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI* By Edmund Gosse (1828-1882) •*"T"»hose whose privilege it was tc A meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at once in the pleni- tude of his powers and in the freshness of their own impres- sions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much young- er than himself, his tact and in- fluence were unequalled ; he re- ceived a shy but ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome, that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This seems to me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man. He was essentially a point of fire ; not a peripatetic in any sense, not a person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure imagination that never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function, was to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmer- ing spirits presented to him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in suggestion, the most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in response, of the men I have known or seen ; and this without a single touch of the pro- phetic manner, the air of such professional seers as Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or abstract ; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice in painting or poetry ; the rest were at the service of whoever would come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to me, which I have just been reading once again, a paper of delightful suggestions about the cover of a book of verse ; the next youth who waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would find that the great genius and master did not disdain the
 * Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hes*.