There was at this time a change coming over his art, a change which suggested that the stricter limits of Pre-Raphaelitism were a little too narrow for him now that his youthful enthusiasms were being replaced by the more tolerant ideas of mental maturity. But he was in no haste to abandon his earlier principles; he sought rather to find how they might be widened to cover artistic motives which scarcely came within the scope of the creed to which the Brotherhood had originally been pledged. So he alternated between the literalism of "The Black Brunswicker" (1860), "The White Cockade" (1862), "My First Sermon" (1863), "My Second Sermon" (1864), and "Asleep" and "Awake," which were shown in 1867 with that daintiest of all his earlier paintings, "The Minuet," and the sombre suggestion of such imaginative pictures as "The Enemy Sowing Tares," and the finely conceived "Eve of St. Agnes," of which the former was exhibited at the Academy in 1865, and the latter in 1863. It seemed as if he was trying to make up his mind as to the direction he was to take for the future, testing his powers in various ways, and studying himself to see how his wishes and his temperament could best be brought into accord. But when in 1868 he broke into the new art world in which he was to reign supreme for nearly thirty years, his abandonment of the technical methods which he had adopted in 1849, and used ever since with comparatively little modification, was as decisive as it was surprising. In 1867 he was the careful, searching, and literal student of small details, precise in brushwork, and exactly realistic in his record of what he had microscopically examined. His "Asleep" and "Awake" were in his most matter-of-fact vein, almost pedantically accurate in statement of obvious facts; and even his charming "Minuet" was elaborated with a care that left nothing for the imagination to supply. In 1868, however, all this dwelling upon little things, all this studied minuteness of touch and literal presentation of what was obvious, had suddenly disappeared. All that remained to him of his Pre-Raphaelitism was the acuteness of vision which had served him so well for twenty years in his intimate examination of nature; everything else had gone, his minute actuality was replaced by large and generous suggestion, his restrained brushwork by the broadest and most emphatic handling, his realistic view by a kind of magnificent impressionism which expressed rightly enough the personal robustness of the man himself.