The first illustration for Desdemona's Death Song is simply a rough sketch, but even taken as such it shows how blind or how careless in the matter of form Rossetti at times could be. Here the lower part of the figure is so obviously lacking in proportion that it prevents us accepting an otherwise characteristic drawing as such. Still of Rossetti's best moments is the controlling grace of the bend in the maid's wrist, and the movement of her head as she combs Desdemona's hair. The curtain blown into the room by the wind is one of those touches Rossetti gives everywhere; by insistence on such an incident he makes us live the moments depicted in his pictures--just as we find ourselves in moments of extreme tension watching eagerly something absolutely trivial and making some accident portent with meaning. In the second and completer study for this picture we find the proportions corrected; thought and after-thoughts have developed the artist's intentions. Desdemona, with her hand hanging thoughtfully, is an improvement on her attitude at first. The maid, however, has lost much of the spontaneity of her original gestures. Like all those in whose art we find phases of an extraordinary beauty Rossetti could often draw in the most uninspired fashion, presumably where his interest flagged. In the drawing of Hamlet and Ophelia, Ophelia is charming; but it is with difficulty that we are reconciled to the Hamlet; it is difficult even to understand in what position the figure is standing; not that this indefiniteness often matters in art, but here, where everything else is so precise, it provokes dissatisfaction. From Rossetti alone could have come the background with the winding ways parting and meeting rhythmically with steps up to the bridge. Such architecture as this, and all the quaint furniture in his pictures, were designed by himself. From his facile imagination anything might come. Certain objects that were full of associations of old things he returned to often in his drawings, such as old Books of Hours with all the sentiment that many hands had given to them. The niche in the picture containing the Crucifix and the Breviaries is significant of the Religion in Rossetti's art. This was his religion, to think of Divine things by the legends of a romantic Church.