A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, or interchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterise Pre-Raphaelite work.  For example, Morris’ poems, “The Blue Closet” and “The Tune of Seven Towers” were inspired by the similarly entitled designs of Rossetti.  They are interpretations in language of pictorial suggestions—­“word-paintings” in a truer meaning than that much-abused piece of critical slang commonly bears.  In one of these compositions—­a water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism—­four damozels in black and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, are singing or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; while in front of them a red lily grows up through the floor.  To this interior Morris’ “stunning picture”—­as his friend called it—­adds an obscurely hinted love story:  the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in the tower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snows outside.  Conversely Rossetti’s painting, “Arthur’s Tomb,” was suggested by Morris’ so-named poem in his 1858 volume.

Or, again, compare Morris’ poem, “Sir Galahad:  A Christmas Mystery,” with the following description of Rossetti’s aquarelle, “How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival’s sister died by the way”:  “On the right is painted the altar, and in front of it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who stoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival’s sister, who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whose feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand, the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost his sister, and the good Sir Bors.  Behind the white-robed damsel at the altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions; and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a row of nimbused angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet or flame-coloured wings.” [21]

Rossetti’s powerful ballad, “The King’s Tragedy,” was suggested by the mural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated the circular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68.  These were a series of scenes from “The Kinges Quair” once attributed to James I. of Scotland.  The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a section of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking from the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walking with her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden.  At the left of the picture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover.  Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais were all great lovers of Keats.  Hunt says that his “Escape of Madeline and Prospero” was the first subject from Keats ever painted, and was highly acclaimed by Rossetti.  At the formation of the P.-R B. in 1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be in illustration