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“It is on sand alone,” said Borrow, “that the sea strikes its true music—Norfolk sand.” “The best of the sea’s lutes,” chimed in the artful Watts, “is made by the sands of Cromer.” The eighteenth century had almost run its course when the exigencies of England’s conflict with the French brought Thomas Borrow, a stalwart Cornishman, into East Anglia, on recruiting service.
To the secluded house at Bognor—a house so surrounded by trees and shrubs that the murmur of the waves mingling with the whispers of the leaves seemed at one moment the sea’s voice, and at another the voice of the earth—Rossetti took not only the cartoon of the ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ but also the most peculiar of all his pictures, ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ which had long lain in an incomplete state.
The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to generation fell upon my heart at last: a common fortune, an unforgettable memory of the sea’s formless might and of the sovereign charm in that woman’s form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather than blood.
But the first night the weather came bad, and so continued, that it was eleven days before any boats could come near us again; and not being acquainted with the height of the sea’s rising, we were almost drowned with wet, and our provisions in as bad a condition, though we worked night and day as much as possible to make shelter for ourselves.
Orford, like Dunwich, was once a place of some importance. ‘A large and populous town with a castle of reddish stone,’ writes Camden, but in his time a victim of the sea’s ingratitude; ‘which withdraws itself little by little, and begins to envy it the advantages of a harbour.’ In the time of Henry I., writes Ralph de Coggeshall, when Bartholomew de Glanville was Governor of its castle, some fishermen there caught a wild man in their nets. ‘All the parts of his body resembled those of a man.
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