In 1875 Rossetti took for a time a pleasant and secluded house near Bognor,—Aldwick Lodge, standing in its own grounds, wellnigh buried in shrubbery, in a lane west of the town, and near (as Dr. Hake tells us in some delightful reminiscences of a visit there) “to the roughest bit of beach on the Sussex coast.” Here, gathering together his mother, sister, and aunts, and such intimate friends as Dr. Hake and Mr. Theodore Watts, he enjoyed at the close of this year a Christmas week to which he afterwards looked back as to one of the happiest he ever spent. It was at Bognor that Rossetti, influenced, no doubt, by his companionship, woke for the first time to the magic of the sea. It is extraordinary that so passionately romantic a spirit as his should have remained, until the eve of his fiftieth year, absolutely unaffected by that profound and intimate sway which the sea holds over the poetic nature once brought, however distantly, within even the rumour and echo of its majestic voice. Now the spell he had so long eluded was cast upon him with irresistible force. He began to haunt the shore with a child’s eagerness for the grandeur and the urgent mystery of tides. Day after day he paced the beach for miles together, pursuing the new vision, the new rapture of the stimulated sense. The surf, tumultuous and loud on that wild coast, enthralled him like a charm; the waves drove his fancy to new spheres; his poetry was turned to fresh scenes and subjects; he began to write “The White Ship,” the first, though perhaps not the greatest, of his historic ballads. For the time, he was absorbed almost wholly in that revelation of splendour and power,—in the primal glories of sea and sky; “two symbols of the infinite,” as the captive Mazzini called them.