I may tell the origin of “Madeline” in a brief sentence. I had framed and delivered a lecture, scientifically treated, on “Sleep, Dreams, Sleep-walking, Sleep-talking and the Mesmeric State,” which last I explained by the facts of hypnotism. It was many years after this that I conceived the idea of conducting a character, in metre, through all these states of the human soul, and “Madeline” became that character.

Dr. Marston said, and I think truly, that the poem had too much machinery—a mistake which I have now corrected by erasure, in case an edition of the work should ever be required.

Watts is a man of many rich endowments; he has a fine poetic faculty, logical, yet warm; with an imagination not introspective only, but one that ranges over nature, and which might be called circumspective. His sonnets will bear the analysis to which I have submitted Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, in a previous page.

Watts is now one of our most esteemed critics.

I had a close acquaintance with Harrison Ainsworth among novelistic editors; he tried to obtain for me the separate publication of “Valdarno,” and, failing, wrote me his confident belief that it must be resuscitated one day.

Ainsworth was a manly and handsome-looking person. His romances gave great pleasure to the readers of his time, which showed how willing people are to live others’ lives without the penalties, though they would very firmly decline living their own over again, without the experience they had too late acquired.

I suppose, in reading every novel, one tastes of all the vices and virtues that have ever been indulged in. One likes to be great and generous vicariously; one even enjoys the sufferings of the wicked at second hand, and to commit even murder on the like terms.

We have all the character, in substrata, not only of the savage, but of the wild beast, of the vulture, of the shark, of the boa constrictor, of the clawed crab, of the animalcule itself. Some feel this, some are wholly unconscious of it until it is accidentally roused, some possess it only in a state of inanimate suppression.

A novel founded on vulture life would have a great run. It should dwell on the domestic virtues of the bird, and show how it held an appointment under Providence to follow in the wake of armies.

One of the finest novels I have read of late years is that of Mr. Eden, entitled “George Donnington,” a work replete with experiences, sympathetic in character, in purpose wise; less a fiction than a narrative of true Russian life, and written with as firm a hand as was ever trained for literary success.

Though I could wish to have done with the “strange eventful history” of a life, thus lived over again, I must not rush on too fast, but must revert to “Parables and Tales.”

The publisher of “Madeline” asked me to add four more poems to “Old Souls,” and the three others of the same metre, for an illustrated work; accordingly, I gave him “Mother and Child,” “The Blind Boy,” “The Cripple,” and “Old Morality.”

One morning at Cheyne Walk I read “The Cripple” to Rossetti and HÜffer, and saw them both in tears.

I had written “The Blind Boy” before the new volume was contemplated, and I sent it to Rossetti. In answer he wrote to me, saying that he was on the point of going out when it reached him, but that he stayed in to read it, and was so impressed on doing so, that he at once sat down and wrote to Mr. John Morley, advising its insertion in the Fortnightly Review. But Morley had recently printed in that vehicle a long poem of W. B. Scott’s, and had thereupon resolved never to admit again another verse of any author whatsoever.

When “Parables and Tales” appeared Rossetti selected the Fortnightly for his review of the new volume. He never wrote any reviews except of my poems. All the notices I ever received of my writings were by strangers, except those kindly given of them by Rossetti and his brother: that is all I owe to friendship.

At this time I was personally free from professional engagements. Lady Ripon was no more, greatly to my sorrow, so I went for a few weeks to Bath.

It was a great pleasure to me when staying in that beautiful and healthful city to visit the grave of Beckford, the wonderful author of “Vatec.”

The cemetery and tomb of Beckford would have been a scene for Volney, though it is not a ruin, unless it be regarded as one of human vanity. “Vatec” is monument enough without a sarcophagus of polished porphyry, and a tower lined with the same costly stone.

A medical friend of Mr. Beckford’s told me some curious details respecting that gentleman’s will. He had sunk his remaining property in an annuity, with the exception of a unique collection of pictures and statues valued at £100,000, destined for Hamilton Palace, his daughter’s home. The result is one of many instances which show how little influence the dead exercise over the living.

There was an insuperable difficulty in the dead being buried in his own beautiful cemetery, which was unconsecrated ground, so the heir, the then Duke of Hamilton, had the sarcophagus deposited in the cemetery on the opposite side of the river. The grounds of the one laid out with so much loving care by the deceased, with their tower and exquisitely carved gateway and their finely wrought palings, the porphyry of the tower alone having been brought from Egypt at an expense of £50,000, were sold for £1500, and were about to be converted into a tea-garden for the Lansdown races held hard by.

These preliminaries got through, of course by the duke’s agents, preparations were made for the removal of the pictures and sculptures, but the executors of the will stepped in, and announced that those treasures were not to be given up until Mr. Beckford’s cemetery held his remains.

This was a cruel dilemma, for the property had to be repurchased at an enormous advance on the price paid; but it was done, and the terms of the bishop to consecrate the soil, previously declined, were acceded to. These were that the cemetery should become the property of the Church!

The game was thus cleverly won and profitably; the cemetery is fashionable, people pay high prices for being buried in such good company. Every one visits Beckford’s tomb, and the Church, in acquiring the freehold, will be thought by many to have done well for religion. But my mind is of a perverse nature, and is apt to wander. It sometimes comes across the word “infernal,” in relation to things on high, and is sometimes arrested, as by an erratic block, by the word “humbug,” but it would not like to see the two words in juxtaposition in reference to Church doings.

Beckford had desired that his sarcophagus should be placed on the summit of his tower, whence, should he open his eyes again, and be able to see through porphyry, he would behold Fonthill Abbey.

But this pleasure was denied him, and he only lies above the grass instead of below.

On the tomb one reads—

After some weeks at Bath I went to Germany, staying with my daughter, Mrs. DuprÉ, at Stassfurt, where, underground, had been achieved one of Nature’s most wonderful geological operations. A tidal sea, once extending over many hundred square miles of Prussian Saxony, was gradually blocked out from its connection with the Baltic, and had evaporated, depositing its salts in the order of their solubility, but still replenished at high tide through countless ages, until at last, cut off from its connection with the main waters, it dried up, and during other countless ages became covered two hundred feet deep with soil. The first deposit in this vast bed of salts was common salt (chloride of sodium), a deposit so thick that it has been drilled to a depth of one thousand feet, and not yet pierced through. On the surface of this deposit is found a considerable bed of chloride of potash, with boracic salts, bromides, and others of great commercial value.

Stassfurt is an ancient village some twenty miles from Magdeburg. It has a fine old church, unwittingly founded on a rock of salt, or at least above one; not the same thing as a rock, for the miners have been under the church’s foundations, and the earth has quaked and the walls have been split and shaken, almost to falling. The stork has built its nest upon its tower from time immemorial, and is the sacred bird of Stassfurt.

And that vast salt bed, now a mine whose streets reach for miles under the town and country! By torchlight it glitters with reflected flame, surpassing in brilliancy all fairy land! There lies a dead sea, with salt enough to supply the world for ever.

Thirty or forty lofty chimneys are erected over it, and are, as new monuments, strangely marking the spot where a sea had laid buried for ages unknown.

This is in Prussian Saxony, whence came our invaders in the olden time. There is to be seen an old Saxon church in a village just outside the town; one descends into it by steps. A dust of ages, vagrant as the wind, but which loves to take shelter against walls, and to bury them as time goes on, has settled itself for the time to come. Churches exactly like this church are to be seen on the hills of Bath, with their Saxon tower. Inside it are the high pews and the gallery, at one end of which, on the right, near the pulpit, is the pew of the squire. It is old England before it migrated to our shores.

Thus our ancestors brought their institutions here; so we in turn take them with us to newer lands.

My son-in-law was Professor of Chemistry at the Westminster, in succession to the gifted Dr. Marcet, whose assistant he had been for some years. He resigned his place, and his brother Augustus DuprÉ was elected in his stead, while he went to Stassfurt to do chemistry on a larger scale, extricating tens of thousands of tons of potash from its chlorine. He was then the father of a baby, he has now two grown-up daughters and three grown-up sons.

I stayed several weeks at Stassfurt. My son Cecil was there under DuprÉ. He had been a student at the Westminster laboratory; he is now Chief Inspector of Explosives at Melbourne in Victoria.