DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61290#0210
DANTE ROSSETTI
170
seeking competent assistance in his studio. His
friend Mr. Knewstub, at first a pupil, filled for
some time the office of assistant. Then Mr.
Henry Treffry Dunn was engaged in 1867, and
remained with Rossetti almost up to the date of
his death. It seems to have been in the years
1867-68 that his health, never fully re-established
after the physical and mental prostration of 1862,
began to give way beneath that most terrible and
relentless of nervous maladies, the special curse of
the artistic temperament—insomnia. To that
slow and baffling torment, by which Nature some-
times seems to be avenging herself in a sort of
frenzied jealousy upon her own handiwork, Ros-
setti’s highly wrought sensibilities and overwhelm-
ing imagination made him the more easy prey.
His whole being was constitutionally endowed
with that fatal faculty of visualizing the invisible,
of suffering more acutely under imagined than
under realized pains (though both were laid upon
him) which, like an all-consuming fire, burns itself
out only with the life that feeds it. Of such sleep-
less nights as thus become the terror of their
victims, haunted with all memories and all fears,
Rossetti has left us many a painfully vivid word-
picture in his poetry; supremely, perhaps, in that
most tragic sonnet, “Sleepless Dreams”—
“ Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,”
170
seeking competent assistance in his studio. His
friend Mr. Knewstub, at first a pupil, filled for
some time the office of assistant. Then Mr.
Henry Treffry Dunn was engaged in 1867, and
remained with Rossetti almost up to the date of
his death. It seems to have been in the years
1867-68 that his health, never fully re-established
after the physical and mental prostration of 1862,
began to give way beneath that most terrible and
relentless of nervous maladies, the special curse of
the artistic temperament—insomnia. To that
slow and baffling torment, by which Nature some-
times seems to be avenging herself in a sort of
frenzied jealousy upon her own handiwork, Ros-
setti’s highly wrought sensibilities and overwhelm-
ing imagination made him the more easy prey.
His whole being was constitutionally endowed
with that fatal faculty of visualizing the invisible,
of suffering more acutely under imagined than
under realized pains (though both were laid upon
him) which, like an all-consuming fire, burns itself
out only with the life that feeds it. Of such sleep-
less nights as thus become the terror of their
victims, haunted with all memories and all fears,
Rossetti has left us many a painfully vivid word-
picture in his poetry; supremely, perhaps, in that
most tragic sonnet, “Sleepless Dreams”—
“ Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,”