Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/314

288 288 THE FIRST MORRIS the joy we gain is something inseparable from these particular epithets, drawn up in just these ranks ; and the ripe, muffled padding, as of velvet feet, which the d's and m's make up and down the lines {dyes, dim, splendid, deep-damask' d, diamonded, device), and the double meanings which merge and blend, with such a sumptuous deepening of the general richness, in such luxuriously ambiguous words as diamonded and damask, all melt into the glow of the picture itself — perhaps even blur it a little, so that its details grow dim, as they would in reality, fainting into one warm, delicious suffusion. But all that mattered to Morris, all he perceived and enjoyed, was the stained-glass window itself and the intricate carving. Just as, in his later life, when he was making such windows in reality, he could pick up in swift succession each of the tiny panes in a great rose window and carry all their relations massed clearly in his mind, so here he caught out of the words the exact casement Keats thought of — valuing the description solely for the fullness and clearness with which it supplied him with this luxurious raw material. And, as with Keats, so with all the other great describers, through whose visions, as a voluptuous undergraduate, he went greedily foraging for scenery and sensations. " He understood Tennyson's greatness in a manner that we [his fellow-undergraduates], who were mostly absorbed by the language, could not share," says Canon Dixon : " he understood it as if the poerns represented substantial things that were to be con- sidered out of the poems as well as in them. It was this substantial view that afterwards led him to admire ballads, real ballads, so highly." . . . For "admire," read "enjoy." And this childlike indifference to " the language " aided his pilferings still further by making it prac- tically impossible to follow up and identify his spoil.