'Before leaving BIdeford, he told Osborne, he had read Rossetti's poems "rapturously": "I am mad about Rossetti ever since and I solemnly declare that of all poems that I have read "Sister Helen" is the finest. Never in my life, not in Shakespeare, not even in Browning have I read such superbly passionate, such agonizingly intense accents of unfaltering revenge and implacable hate, creating, surely, a new shudder!"'