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THE CUP OF WATER

THE CUP OF WATER

The young King of a country is hunting on a day with a young Knight, his friend; when, feeling thirsty, he stops at a Forester's cottage, and the Forester's daughter brings him a cup of water to drink. Both of them are equally enamoured at once of her unequalled beauty. The King, however, has been affianced from boyhood to a Princess, worthy of all love, and whom he has always believed he loved until
undeceived by his new absorbing passion; but the Knight, resolved to sacrifice all other considerations to his love, goes again to the Forester's cottage and asks his daughter's hand. He finds that the girl has fixed her thoughts on the King, whose rank she does not know. On hearing it she tells her suitor humbly that she must die if such be her fate, but cannot love another. The Knight goes to the King to tell him all and beg his help; and the two friends then come to an explanation. Ultimately the King goes to the girl and pleads his friend's cause, not disguising his own passion, but saying that as he sacrifices himself to honour, so should she, at his prayer, accept a noble man whom he loves better than all men and whom she will love too. This she does at last; and the King makes his friend an Earl and gives him a grant of the forest and surrounding country as a marriage gift, with the annexed condition, that the Earl's
wife shall bring the King a cup of water at the same spot on every anniversary of their first meeting when he rides a-hunting with her husband. At no other time will he see her, loving her too much. He weds the Princess, and thus two years pass, the condition being always fulfilled. But before the third anniversary the lady dies in childbirth, leaving a daughter. The King's life wears on, and still he and his friend pursue their practice of hunting on that day, for sixteen years. When the anniversary comes round for the sixteenth time since the lady's death, the Earl tells his daughter, who has grown to her mother's perfect likeness (but whom the King has never
seen), to meet them on the old spot with the cup of water, as her mother first did when of the same age. The King, on seeing her, is deeply moved; but on her being presented to him by the Earl, he is about to take the cup from her hand, when he is aware of a second figure in her exact likeness, but dressed in peasant's clothes, who steps to her side as he bends from his horse to take the cup, looks in his face with solemn words of love and welcome, and kisses him on the mouth. He falls forward on his horse's neck, and is lifted up dead.

Short story by Rossetti

According to]. W. Mackail, Life of William Morris) OUP ed. 1950, i, 140, it was Rossctti and Edward Burne-Jones who first met Jane Burden. Lady Burne-Jones, in her Memorials of Edward Burne-fones, 1904. i, 168, states that Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes and William Morris were all at the theatre together when the meeting took place.

Like the story did Rossetti encourage Jane to marry William, as he felt he couldn't abandon Lizzie ?

Rossetti in Loves

Henry Hall Caine, who, as a young man, was the close companion of Rossetti in his
last months, disclosed in 1928 that Rosserti, in an extremity of depression during the long night journey on their return from Cumberland, had revealed himself as a 'man who, after engaging himself to one woman in all honour and good faith, had fallen
in love with another, and then gone on to marry the first out of a mistaken sense of loyalty and a fear of giving pain' - with disastrous consequences.'

Recollections of Rorsetti, 1928, pp. 141 and 200. Caine also quotes, p. 220, Rossetti's comment on somewhat different circumstances: 'To marry one woman and then find out when it is too late, that you love another is the deepest tragedy that can enter into a man's life.' Caine's Recollections of Dante Rossetti, 1882 published four months after Rossetti's death, was silent on these matters.

Barnaby Rudge

image from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, illustrated either by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) or George Cattermole.

(Wordsworth Classics edition)

William Morris read the book to Jane whilst he was courting her in Oxford

Rossetti on William

'The Bard and Petty Tradesman', from an album of 60 caricature drawings; illustrated letter from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, showing the two sides of William Morris back-to-back, at left playing a harp and at right behind a desk. 1868
Pen and brown ink

Rossetti on Jane

‘You are the noblest and dearest thing the world has had to show me; and no lesser loss than the loss of you could have brought me so much bitterness, I would still have had this to endure than have missed the fullness of wonder and wondership which nothing else could have made known to me’.

Bryson, John, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 34.

[Study of Jane Morris for the Virgin in 'The Seed of David']

May Morris signature scratched on glass on an inside door of The Red House