Yet the water-colours of the second period, capricious and experimental in treatment as many of them are, include some of the most valuable, because the most characteristic and significant, of Rossetti’s work in the realm of pure romance. In these rough and often hasty sketches, sometimes less than twelve by twenty inches in size, his imagination seems to have been exercising itself upon the poetic subjects that haunted him by turns with the vividness of actual life, more vital and urgent than the realities of every day. Several, indeed, of the finest of these water-colours are now dated, on good authority, as early as 1848–49; such as the lovely little sepia sketch, “The Sun may Shine and we be cold,” given to his friend, Alexander Monro, a young Scottish sculptor of high promise, whose early death from consumption removed an artist who could ill be spared from the small and never very strong sculpture-branch of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this period also belong some of the most important of the Dante subjects. From 1849 is dated “A Parable of Love,” one of the best of Rossetti’s early drawings in pen and ink. The lady is seated at an easel on which she has been painting her own portrait from a mirror at her side. Her lover, bending over her from behind, lays his hand upon hers to guide the brush anew. Mr. Woolner served as the model for the lover. A pen-drawing from Browning’s “Sordello,” entitled “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” also belongs to 1849, together with the powerful little sketch, “The Laboratory,” from the same poet, showing a strange, brilliant, witch- like or almost serpent-like woman in an alchemist’s shop, procuring from him some fateful elixir wherewith to play upon her rival and avenge herself upon the lover, once her own. One of the most beautiful water-colours of 1850 is the “Morning Music;” a dainty little half-length figure of a white-clad girl seated at her toilet, another maiden brushing her long bright hair, while her lover stands, making music from some archaic instrument, at her side. At this time also Rossetti made the first sketch of a subject which fascinated him with peculiar force almost throughout his artistic career, and to which he returned again and again in several media, even within a short time of his death, but without ever achieving a finished picture— “Michael Scott’s Wooing.”