In the early part of 1854 Rossetti wrote to Ruskin that he was occupied with ideas for three subjects, _Found_, _Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon_, and another which is not named, but which from the context one may infer to have been the water-colour diptych of _Paolo and Francesco da Rimini_. In August of the same year he wrote that he was at work on a _Hamlet and Ophelia_, "deeply symbolical of course," and predestined for the folio which Millais had presented, and which was still supposed to be in circulation among the members of a select sketching club. About the same time he submitted to Ruskin two designs for _The Passover_, one of which was chosen to be begun at once, while Ruskin also commissioned seven drawings from the "Purgatorio," of which one certainly, _Matilda gathering Flowers_, was very shortly put in hand. None of these undertakings saw the light for at least another year; the _Hamlet_ not for four or five. The _Matilda_ was finished first and delivered in September 1855, and on the 2nd December Madox Brown records in his diary, _apropos_ Miss Siddal being stranded in Paris without money, "Gabriel, who saw that none of the drawings on the easel could be completed before long, began a fresh one, _Francesca da Rimini_, in _three compartments_; worked day and night, finished it in a week, got thirty-five guineas for it from Ruskin, and started off to relieve them." This was the earliest version of a subject that Rossetti returned to more than once, representing in one compartment the lover's kiss, and in the second their two souls floating clasped together in Hell through a rain of pale sulphurous flames. Between the compartments are two figures meant for Dante and Virgil, with the words "O Lasso!" Within the same period, viz., by October, 1855, another Dante subject, _The Vision of Rachel and Leah_, was taken up and completed. _The Passover_ drawing, just referred to, is a small, unfinished water-colour, in which once more Rossetti has treated the domestic life of the Holy Family with a reverent freedom from conventionality, such as Millais used in _The Carpenter's Shop_ and Holman Hunt in the _Finding of Christ in the Temple_. _The Passover_ was one of Rossetti's very earliest designs, having been sketched out first as far back as 1849; it was the one selected for a memorial window to Rossetti in the church at Birchington-on-Sea, where he was buried. Other drawings which are dated, or were finished by 1855, though they may have been in hand considerably earlier, are _The Nativity_, _La Belle Dame sans Mercy_, and the _Annunciation_, all water-colours. In the last-named the Virgin (done from Miss Siddal) is represented washing clothes in a stream, whilst the angel Gabriel stands by with folded wings, between two trees: both are in white, and the picture shows a strong effect of sunlight.