wn with some feeling for grace, and in a very
earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that
it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this
unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the
practice of directly sacred art.

For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in
painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and
dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large
picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by
Browning. He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his
own media, felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in
short, through one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so
marvellously described in "Tired with all these," and which are
incident, sooner or later, to every man of genius. While his touch in
poetry grew constantly more sure and masterly, his power as a
draughtsman threatened to leave him altogether. He was to have drawn
one of the frontispieces in the "Germ," but, although he toiled with a
design, he could not make it "come right." At last a happy accident
put him on the true track, and revealed his proper genius to himself.
He began to make small drawings of poetical subjects in
water-colors--most of those which I have seen are not more than twenty
inches by twelve--over which he labored, and into which he poured his
exquisite sense of color, inspired without doubt by the glass of
mediaeval church windows. He travelled so very little, that I do not
know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant jewel-work which
fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he never saw them, he
divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the
least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period.
As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become
interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of
emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly
before him; then--and this seems to have always been the difficult and
tedious part--to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to
fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable
difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper
upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely
accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the _dramatis
personae_ were shee