His later career was as quiet as its opening had been brilliant. After that graciously sentimental little picture, "Ecce Ancilla Domini," Rossetti exhibited in public only once again; this was in 1856. From that date the public saw no more of his painting. He worked only for his friends and the friends of his friends. He was famous only in private, and looked up to like a god within a narrow circle of admirers. One of his acquaintances, the painter Deverell, had introduced him in 1850 to the woman who became for him what Saskia Uylenburgh had been for Rembrandt and Helene Fourment for Rubens--his type of feminine beauty. She was a young dressmaker's assistant, Miss Eleanor Siddal. Her thick, heavy hair was fair, with that faint reddish tint in it which Titian painted; it grew in two tapering bands deep down into the neck, being there somewhat fairer than it was above, and it curled thickly. Her eyes had something indefinite in their expression; nothing, however, that was dreamy, mobile, and changeable, for they seemed rather to be insuperable, fathomless, and unnaturally vivid. All the play of her countenance lay in the lower part of her face, in the nostrils, mouth, and chin. The mouth, indeed, with its deep corners, sharply chiselled outlines, and lips triumphantly curved, was particularly expressive. And her tall, slender figure had a refined distinction of line. In 1860 they married. Some of his most beautiful works were painted during this epoch--the "Beata Beatrix," the "Sibylla Palmifera," "Monna Vanna," "Venus Verticordia," "Lady Lilith," and "The Beloved"--pictures which he painted without a thought of exhibition or success. After a union of barely two years this passionately loved woman died, shortly after the birth of a still-born child. He laid a whole volume of manuscript poems--many of them inspired by her--in the coffin, and they were buried with her. From that time he lived solitary and secluded from the world, surrounded by mediæval antiques, in his old-fashioned house at Chelsea, entirely given up to his dreams, a stranger in a world without light. He suffered much from ill-health, and was sensitive and hypochondriacal, and, indeed, undermined his health by an immoderate use of chloral. His friends entreated him to bring out his poems, and all England was expectant when Rossetti at length yielded to pressure, opened the grave of his wife, and took out the manuscript. The poems appeared in the April of 1870. The first edition was bought up in ten days, and there followed six others. Wherever he appeared he was honoured like a god. But the attacks directed against the first pictures of the pre-Raphaelites were repeated, although now transferred to another region. A pseudonymous article by Robert Buchanan in the _Contemporary Review_, and published afterwards as a pamphlet, entitled _The Fleshly School of Poetry_, accused Rossetti of immorality and imitation of Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade.