Up to the seventies Millais continued to paint such pictures out of the Bible, or from English and mediæval poets, with varying success. One of them, which in its brilliant colouring looked like an old picture upon glass, represented the return of the dove to Noah's ark. The central point was formed by two slender young women in mediæval costume, who received the exhausted bird in their delicate hands. The picture, "The Woodman's Daughter," was an illustration to a poem by Coventry Patmore, on the love of a young noble for a poor child of the wood. In a semicircular picture of 1852 he painted Ophelia as she floats singing in the green pool where the white water-lilies cover her like mortuary wreaths--floats with her parted lips flickering with a gentle smile of distraction. The other picture of this year, "The Huguenot," represented two lovers taking leave of each other in an old park upon the eve of St. Bartholomew. She is winding a white scarf round his arm to save him from death by this badge of the Catholics, whilst he is gently resisting. The mood of the man standing before the dark gate of death, the moral strength which vanquishes his fear, and all the solemnity of his farewell to life are expressed in his glance. A world of love rests in the eyes of the woman. Millais has often treated this problem of the loving woman with earnest and almost sombre realism, that knows no touch of swooning sentimentality. "The Order of Release" of 1853 shows a jailor in the scarlet uniform of the eighteenth century opening a heavy prison door to set at liberty a Highlander, whose release has been obtained by his wife. A scene from the seventeenth century is treated in "The Proscribed Royalist": a noble cavalier, hidden in a hollow tree, is kissing the hand of a graceful, trembling woman, who has been daily bringing him food at the risk of her life. "The Black Brunswicker" of 1856 closed this series of silent and motionless dramas. In the picture of 1857, "Sir Isumbras at the Ford," an old knight is riding home through the twilight of a sultry day in June. The dust of the journey lies upon his golden armour. At a ford he has fallen in with two children, and has lifted them up to carry them over the water. And "The Vale of Rest," a picture deep and intense in its scheme of colour, earnest and melancholy as a requiem, revealed--with a sentiment a little like that of Lessing--a cloister garden where two nuns are silently preparing a grave in the evening light; while "The Eve of Saint Agnes" in 1863 illustrated the same poem of Keats to which ten years previously Holman Hunt had devoted his work of early years. Madeleine has heard the old legend, telling how girls receive the tender homage of their future husbands if they go through their evening prayer supperless at midnight. With her heart filled with the thoughts of love she quits the hall where the guests are seated at a merry feast, and mounts to her room so