About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion was brighter than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a luckless remark, for Rossetti's prevailing wish at that moment was to conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit, he had completed his _King's Tragedy_, and I had heard from his own lips how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out of him. "It was as though my life ebbed out with it," he said, and in saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes. Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had made effort to read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation. And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke, the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries, and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.