wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean
religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found
any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on
working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at
scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent ones
one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her
name was Charlotte Bronte. Spreading around us upon every side to-day
like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches of
the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as
well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the
frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of
ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;
there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses
is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these
men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of
these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single
house of all those millions which has not seemed to some one at some
time the heart of all things and the end of travel.

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris
should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many
men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have
been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious
hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious
problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that
honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of
workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time
has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be
described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter
instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully
conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we
should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with
the grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should
have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually
approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have
invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an