University of Virginia Library

In the summer of 1854 I had rooms in quiet, shady little Queen's Square, Bloomsbury (corner house on the left as you come from Southampton Row), and there one afternoon appeared, as it often did, the welcome face of Gabriel Rossetti. ‘Would I come out with him?’ ‘With the greatest pleasure, if he could wait a little while.’ He took a book and sat silent. A quarter of an hour or so later (it was a scribbling-book of mine that was in his hands) he had made a pen and ink drawing in it opposite to a translation of a poem of Heine's, twelve lines long, which he had never seen before. I think he was not dissatisfied with this rapid design, which he signed and dated, and that many will be gratified by its reproduction. The size of the original is six inches by four and a quarter.