Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/252

ÆT. 38] or disuse of vegetables. "There are two things," he said in one of his perverse moods, "about which women know absolutely nothing, dress and cookery: their twist isn't that way. They have no sense of colour or grace in drapery, and they never invented a new dish or failed to half spoil an old one." A passage in the fifth book of Lucretius will occur to the classical reader as a parallel: and, indeed, all of that wonderful description of the origins of civilization, alike in its swift insight and in a certain childlike interest in details, is not unlike the talk which Morris would often pour out to his friends.

Above all, beyond even his delight in great buildings, in history, in the masterpieces of human invention, lay in him that intense passion for Nature, "my love of the earth and worship of it," which, soon after the completion of "The Earthly Paradise," obtained a centre in the Manor House at Kelmscott. For the twenty-five years during which this beautiful old house was his country home, he found in it a peace and joy that no other place gave him, and his attachment to it became more and more deep—one may boldly say, more and more passionate: for with him the love of things had all the romance and passion that is generally associated with the love of persons only. "It has come to be to me," he wrote in 1882, "the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless simple people not overburdened with the intricacies of life; and as others love the race of man through their lovers or their children, so I love the earth through that small space of it."

Kelmscott was found out by accident. Five years in Bloomsbury had not reconciled Morris or his family to the prospect of unmitigated London, and they had been looking out vaguely for some little country place