neration has ever effected so much in this direction. He
has, indeed, leavened and educated taste; he has destroyed a vile and
hypocritical tradition of domestic art; by his writings he has opened a
door for countless minds into a remote and fragrant region of unspoilt
romance; and, still more than this, he remains an example of one who
made a great and triumphant resignation of all that he held most
dear, for the sake of doing what he thought to be right. He was not an
ascetic, giving up what is half an incumbrance and half a terror; nor
was he naturally a melancholy and detached person; but he gave up
work which he loved passionately, and a life which he lived in a
full-blooded, generous way, that he might try to share his blessings
with others, out of a supreme pity for those less richly endowed than
himself.

How, then, should not this corner of the world, which he loved so
dearly, speak to the spirit with a voice and an accent far louder and
more urgent than its own tranquil habit of sunny peace and green-shaded
sweetness! "You know my faith," wrote Morris from Kelmscott in a
bewildered hour, "and how I feel I have no sort of right to revenge
myself for any of my private troubles on the kind earth; and here I feel
her kindness very specially, and am bound not to meet it with a long
face." Noble and high-hearted words! for he of all men seemed made by
nature to enjoy security and beauty and the joys of living, if ever man
was so made. His very lack of personal sensitiveness, his unaptness to
be moved by the pathetic appeal of the individual, might have been made
a shield for his own peace; but he laid that shield down, and bared
his breast to the sharp arrows; and in his noble madness to redress the
wrongs of the world he was, perhaps, more like one of his great generous
knights than he himself ever suspected.

This, then, I think is the reason why this place--a grey grange at the
end of a country lane, among water meadows--has so ample a call for the
spirit. A place of which Morris wrote, "The scale of everything of the
smallest, but so sweet, so unusual even; it was like the background
of an innocent fairy-story." Yes, it might have been that! Many of the
simplest and quietest of lives had been lived there, no doubt, before
Morris came that way. But with him came a realisation of its virtues, a
perception that in its smallness and sweetness it yet held imprisoned,
like the gem that sits on the smallest finger of