Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/253

232 which they might make more or less permanently their own, and which would release them from that incubus of middle class London life, the recurring choice of a place for summer quarters, and the discomforts of a holiday in lodgings. An advertisement of Kelmscott Manor House in a London houseagent's list in the early spring of 1871 seemed to offer a place that would just suit them, and when he went down to see it, the reality exceeded his best expectations.

On the 17th of May he writes to Faulkner: "I have been looking about for a house for the wife and kids, and whither do you guess my eye is turned now? Kelmscott, a little village about two miles above Radcott Bridge—a heaven on earth; an old stone Elizabethan house like Water Eaton, and such a garden! close down on the river, a boat house and all things handy. I am going there again on Saturday with Rossetti and my wife: Rossetti because he thinks of sharing it with us if the thing looks likely."

The house stands on the upper Thames, thirty miles by water from Oxford. It is approached by lanes from the little town of Lechlade, three miles off, to which there is now a railway. At that time, however, that line did not go beyond Witney, and Kelmscott had to be reached from Faringdon, by a long drive through the Berkshire hills. Both may be called back ways of approaching it; the grand entry, up the lovely lonely waterway, was described by Morris himself thus, nearly twenty years later:

"On we went, turning a sharp angle and going north a little. Presently we saw before us a bank of elm-trees, which told us of a house amidst them. In a few minutes we had passed through a deep eddying pool into the sharp stream that ran from the ford, and