William Bell Scott had attained midlife anonymity when, in 1847, he received an unsolicited communication from an aspiring "Student of the Academy" signing himself "Gabriel Chas. Rossetti" and expressing in the warmest terms his unbridled enthusiasm for the poetic effusions of the older man--his poems "Rosabell" and "A Dream of Love" (published in the Monthly Repository in 1838) and his volume of quasi-philosophic musings, The Year of the World (1846). Having seen a notice of the latter work, the young poet-painter wrote: "I rushed from my friend's house where I had seen the announcement, ... and having got the book, fell upon it like a vulture. You may be pretty certain that you had in me one of those readers who 'read the volume at a single sitting.' A finer, a more dignitous, a more deeply thoughtful production--a work that is more truly a work--has seldom indeed shed its light...