r the pleasure of copying the sweet words, let me transcribe
a few sentences from Morris's own description of the house itself:

"A house that I love with a reasonable love, I think; for though my
words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure
you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of
the soil and the lives of those that lived on it: some thin thread of
tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre
and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much, let us hope) of
common-sense, a liking for making materials serve one's turn, and
perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment--this, I think, was
what went to the making of the old house."

And again:

"My feet moved along the road they knew. The raised way led us into a
little field, bounded by a backwater of the river on one side; on the
right hand we could see a cluster of small houses and barns, and before
us a grey stone barn and a wall partly overgrown with ivy, over which
a few grey gables showed. The village road ended in the shallow of the
backwater. We crossed the road, and my hand raised the latch of a door
in the wall, and we stood presently on a stone path which led up to the
old house. The garden between the wall and the house was redolent of
the June flowers, and the roses were rolling over one another with that
delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first
sight takes away all thought save that of beauty. The blackbirds were
singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the roof-ridge, the
rooks in the high elm trees beyond were garrulous among the young
leaves, and the swifts wheeled whirring about the gables. And the house
itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of summer.

"O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and
all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it--as this has
done! The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but
say or show how I love it!"

The pure lyrical beauty of these passages makes one out of conceit
with one's own clumsy sentences. But still, I will say how all that
afternoon, among the quiet fields, with the white clouds rolling up
over the lip of the wolds, I was haunted with the thought of that burly
figure; the great head with its curly hair and beard; the eyes that
seemed so guarded and unobservant, and that yet saw and noted every
smallest d