We are all musicians, not that we all compose or play—except on each other’s feelings. The nervous system is the one marvellous harmonium. Its strings are more in number than those of a thousand harps, and all that is most exquisite, most exalted, and beautiful, can be performed upon it with a vehemence that incites to merriment or rends the heart. It can receive and realize the concert of a thousand voices!

All this we experience in our intercourse of every day; at the sight of a beloved one, we extemporize some pleasing harmony.

But this human harp has not all its rich notes attuned and struck by others; it is more often Eolian, and spontaneously pours out its emotions in the solitude of its sorrow and its joy; and it is not always music set in words or confined to our own sphere of being. This the poet feels when, resting in his chamber, his spirit passes into that of others, drawn by a divine sympathy. It becomes a concert then with many others’ trials. The sufferings are reverberated within him, like the sound of distant music.

How easy is it in this way to enter another’s soul, to share in its tribulation, to sink as deeply into it as to reach its self-love, and learn how like it is to our own!

My friend Dr. Ewart, a physician now to St. George’s Hospital, and a distinguished writer on chest-affections, sent me a friendly letter to Professor Schiff of Florence, of which I availed myself largely. It was at that time, too, that Madox Brown sent me a letter to Colonel Gillum, at whose house I first met Madame Mazzini. Dr. Schiff had the lead in science on nerve-function, and I constantly attended his demonstrations. They were always performed on anÆstheticized dogs. I learned much of him. He was greatly esteemed by the Florentine Government, by whom he was given apartments in the vacated convent of Sta. Annunciata, together with the extensive garden.

Professor Schiff was not a man of the Majendie kind who could drown all consciousness of animal suffering in the pleasure of reading science out of a living book; he was benevolent, and he guarded carefully against the creature on which he operated being alive to pain. But his emotional enemies were too strong for him; they were chiefly some English of fashion, and they got Capponi on their side; the most deservedly esteemed of Florentine nobles, whose residence was opposite to that of the professor.

This led to a correspondence between the neighbours, which ended for a time in Schiff convincing Capponi that no cruelty was practised, and that the operations on animals were painless.

However, Schiff had many animals; the municipality had ordered the police to supply the professor with all stray dogs, for which they could discover no owner. There was one dog amongst these that would bay the moon in spite of every effort to silence its superstitious moanings; and the enemy hearing this, interviewed Capponi again, and told him that Schiff was known to torture his dogs in the night season.

Capponi, in his palace opposite, had only too surely heard those midnight wailings.

The appointment of Professor Schiff to a chair of physiology and to the hospital was a Government one; his diagnosis of disease was regarded as remarkably rapid and successful. At his house, which was graced by Madame Schiff and her daughter, ladies of high culture, I met many interesting persons, one especially, a Moscow lady, who every year went to St. Petersburg, thence to Florence, thence to the Isle of Wight, where she had grandchildren at school and where she visited her friends, Lord and Lady Cottenham.

I speak of this lady because her love of our country almost amounted to a passion. The people, she said, were so kind; strangers would stop to help her from a railway carriage! Then the Isle of Wight, how lovely! Fuchsias flowering in the hedgerows, and climbing up the cottage walls!

As in Germany the “Vicar of Wakefield” is in every cottage, so, she said, is “Paradise Lost” in every Russian home.

I wish that I could give her name.

The last I heard of Professor Schiff was that his enemies had prevailed, and that he had returned to Berne, welcomed by his own people.

In the November of this year, I revised “Ecce Homo,” and composed the “Double Soul,” both of which are in “New Symbols.” I also wrote “Lucilla, the First Saved,” at that time, a favourite of the good and gifted Christina Rossetti.

It was at this period that I was engaged on “The Sculptor” (M. Angelo). I sat in the Hall of Niobe for the manner, and stood in the Chapel of the Medici for the matter, of this little poem. I sent it as aforesaid, to Rossetti, who was at Kelmscott.

“Pythagoras,” too, was of this period.

In February, 1874, I wrote an article on some of Professor Schiff’s work, and sent it to Dr. Anstey, to be inserted in The Practitioner, in which it shortly appeared, giving much satisfaction to Schiff himself.

During this visit to “Florence my Fair,” I was in constant correspondence with D. G. Rossetti, Theodore Watts, and other friends; and I left behind me many there whom I had reason to esteem. Colonel and Mrs. Gillum showed me many kindly attentions, not the least of which was that of asking me to meet Madame Mazzini at their table. He, in common with that lady, took a deep interest in a recently deceased friend, Miss Blagden, who, through Mr. Watts, had appointed to meet me at Florence. She was an authoress of promise. But, before I reached Italy, she was lying in the English cemetery at Florence, where, with her friends, I visited her grave.

It was, however, as a social centre that she took her high position in Florence. She was the intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and she is the heroine of Madame Villari’s novel, “In Change Unchanged.”