Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustration was "The Maids of Elfen-Mere" (1855), for a poem by his friend William Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Poems" and illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti, but were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" which Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry. In February 1857, Rossetti wrote
Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicted a prostitute, lifted from the street by a country drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones, For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's "La Vita Nuova" (published as "The Early Italian Poets" in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur" inspired his art of the 1850s. He created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations. He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink. His first published