The insomnia which began to attack Rossetti in his thirty-ninth year, and which was the indirect cause of his subsequent breakdown, led him in 1869 to drop work for a time and to take a holiday at Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, the residence of an old friend. The visit is of interest, because it was not until this occasion that he gave a serious thought to the publishing of his early poems, some of which were still going about in manuscript in a more or less finished condition, though others were buried in his wife's grave. As a relief from the strain of painting, moreover, he began to write again. His first idea was to have the poems, such of them as he could collect or recall from memory, set up in type to keep by him as a nucleus for a possible volume; gradually, however, the idea of publishing outright grew or was forced upon him; and the last obstacle to this, the loss of so much of his early work, was finally removed one day in October, 1869, when, after a consent wrung from him very reluctantly, the grave was opened, and the manuscript poems recovered. In 1870 the book appeared, having as publisher Mr. F S. Ellis, of King Street, Covent Garden. The poems proved an immediate and lucrative success, and were favourably reviewed except for the single attack made upon them in a pseudonymous article by the late Mr. Buchanan. The effect of even one attack, however, and it was admittedly a very unfair and bitter attack, on a man of Rossetti's temperament, suffering from nervous fancies, and troubled by want of sleep, was disastrous. He viewed as a great conspiracy against him what other men, in sounder health, would have been able to disregard, and the effect was unhappily permanent. He had begun to acquire the habit of taking chloral as a cure for sleeplessness, without knowing, what is well known now, its lamentable after-effect, and for a short time, if one may accept his brother's judgment, Rossetti was hardly to be regarded as sane. A severe breakdown caused him to be removed once more to Scotland, where after a complete rest he was enabled to resume painting, and in September, 1872, he joined with Mr. and Mrs. Morris in taking the old Elizabethan Manor House of Kelmscott, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. His work here consisted to a large extent in repainting many of his old pictures, which he had sent to him for the purpose. In this way he worked upon the _Lilith_, _Beloved_, _Monna Vanna_, and other important canvases, including even the little early _Ecce Ancilla Domini_. Rossetti left Kelmscott in July, 1874, and returned to London; and that was the end of his connection with the quiet Gloucestershire retreat, which thenceforward became associated solely with the life of William Morris.