While Millais and Holman Hunt were outwardly dominant in the region of reform, and, in the exhibitions of 1850–51, were leading the Brotherhood Militant boldly into the enemy’s camp, Rossetti was entering upon a phase of doubt and perplexity, of self-distrust and hesitation, which resolved itself into an important crisis in his artistic development. A variety of circumstances diverted him in 1850 from the special line of religious painting, exemplified in “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” which had been the chief outlet of his early enthusiasms in art,—if indeed so inadequate a phrase be permissible in regard to pictures which must rank with the purest products of his genius in its pristine robustness and simplicity. An incident in the studio-annals of the Brotherhood now turned him aside from the mediævo- religious manner adopted directly and literally from the early Italian masters. Rossetti’s convert and disciple, James Collinson, striving to imitate afar off the sincere habit of his leader, set to work upon a congruous subject, “The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth,” and produced a picture so mystical in conception and so hysterical in sentiment, albeit not without a certain grace and beauty of its own, that the sound and practical good sense which tempered the mysticism of Rossetti revolted at once from the extravagance of such a style. He now perceived the danger of pursuing too exclusively a path bordering on the metaphysical and occult, and quickly sought to brace and strengthen both his own imagination and that of his comrade, by departing for a time from the field of what is commonly called “sacred” art, and seeking fresh inspirations in a less rarefied air. Other influences, chiefly of a personal kind, began to play around Rossetti at this time. He had moved, early in the year 1850, to a suite of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars; a block of houses since demolished, but then hospitable enough in a sober charm of environment; within view of the river and the historic horizon of its shores, and of certain grim but not wholly unromantic vistas of the great metropolis. In this home was spent the happiest decade of Rossetti’s life. Here began, soon after his settlement in the new abode, his friendship with the greatest poet of the Victorian age, and with another conspicuous in the second rank of its singers,—Tennyson and Browning,—both destined to exercise a strong influence on Rossetti’s art, though (singularly as it happened) not on his poetry; which remained, through years of intellectual intercourse and the reading together of each other’s verse, absolutely unaffected by either of the widely different poetic styles of the then Laureate and his great contemporary.