Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/255

234 gardens which at first sight takes away all thought save that of beauty. The blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the roof-ridge, the rooks in the high elm-trees beyond were garrulous among the young leaves, and the swifts wheeled whining about the gables. And the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of summer.

"O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it—as this has done! The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love it!"

Such, in the romance of a new Arcadia into which the social revolution might at last lead mankind, is the account Morris gives of his return to the loved place which he could not wish or fancy but unchanged upon a changed and happier earth. The pictures of the house and its surroundings which follow are taken from a more unimpassioned description, which is nevertheless no less lovingly and characteristically worded, in an account of Kelmscott which he wrote in the last year of his life for a magazine conducted by members of the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft.

"The village of Kelmscott lies close to the Thames on the Oxfordshire side of it, some five miles (by water) from the present end of the navigation at Inglesham. To the north-east of the village lies the nearly treeless piece of ground formerly Grafton Common, and beyond it is a string of pretty inland villages. On the Berkshire side a range of heights, low but well designed, rise up from the flat meadows.

"The church, at the north-west end of the village, is small but interesting; the mass of it, a nave with a tiny aisle, transept and chancel, being early English