Page:Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1904).djvu/36

Chapter III.

Blake's "Songs of Innocence"—Alexander Gilchrist—William Michael Rossetti—The tobacco box—Blue Nankin—James McNeil Whistler—The Præ-Raphaelite Brotherhood—William Bell Scott—Ford Madox Brown—Theo Marzials—Rossetti's indifference to music—His curio hunts—First ideas and sketches—John Ruskin—Robert Browning—Algernon Charles Swinburne—William Morris—Tennyson reading "Maud"

To return to Rossetti and the studio. His well-stocked Chippendale bookcase suggesting, I suppose, we began to converse upon books and then about William Blake²⁴, for whose works I had a great reverence and admiration. Observing this, Rossetti went to the shelves and took down a little, unpretentious volume that looked just like a schoolboy's exercise book. Such it was originally intended to be, but the use to which it had been put made it very precious in my sight, for on turning over the leaves I saw it was filled with Blake's first thoughts for his Songs of Innocence, interspersed with pen-and-ink and slightly-coloured pencil designs for the same.²⁵ Rossetti told me he had bought the book many years previously²⁶ from one of the attendants in the British Museum, who had let him have it for half-a-sovereign, and it was from this manuscript collection that the