It was at Bognor, too, that he began work upon the most ambitious of all his great symbolic figures, the “Venus Astarte,” or “Astarte Syriaca,” in which he strove—vainly perhaps, but with a superb effort towards a superhuman task—to combine and express all the mystic sensuousness and occult magic of Orientalism with the clear and scientific wisdom of the Western world. The Syrian Venus stands “between the sun and moon a mystery,” attended by winged and torch-bearing choristers; eloquent of the painter’s long and last struggle to reconcile sense, emotion, and intellect in the highest consummation of pictorial art. In the following summer (1876) Rossetti paid a pleasant visit, at the invitation of Lord and Lady Mount Temple, to their house at Broadlands, in Hampshire, where he made some progress with the best version of “The Blessed Damozel.” The predella to this work, in which the lover left on earth is seen waiting beside a river for the vision of the Beloved, was painted from the beechwoods of the neighbourhood. In 1876 Rossetti went with Madox Brown, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Theodore Watts, and his mother and sister to Herne Bay. Ill health had now settled permanently upon him, and painting became more difficult and intermittent, yet his technical power remained for the most part singularly unimpaired. In 1878 he completed “A Vision of Fiametta,”—an admirable and wholly new version of the subject from Boccaccio which he had treated some years back. Fiametta is in the painter’s thought an angel of immortality: “Gloom-girt ’mid Spring-flushed apple-growths she stands” —his bright Easter-maiden, with the crimson bird on the bough beside her, the symbol of warm, full-blooded life, as is the soft red robe she wears,—of life so rich and sweet as to yield the guarantee of victory; the spirit that can defy death and be its own assurance of resurrection. The apple-blossoms fall in scattered petals to the ground as she pushes the boughs apart with her lifted hand. Behind her is a stormy April sky, but around her head there plays a light, as of hope beyond the grave. She is the covenant of eternal spring, for she —“with re-assuring eyes most fair, A presage and a promise stands; as ’twere On Death’s dark storm the rainbow of the soul.” But now the time was nigh when “Death’s dark storm” must break upon Rossetti. The last great and sane strength of his genius was spent upon poetry,—in the crowning of his romantic ballads with the masterpiece of their class, “The King’s Tragedy.” This was published, in a volume entitled “Ballads and Sonnets,” in 1881. The previous year had seen the completion of the last important picture that ever came fully finished from his hand,—an oil version of the almost full-length figure replicated several times, under the name of “The Day-dream,” and consisting of the most beautiful and perfect of his portraits of Mrs. William Morris.