Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/260

ÆT. 38] the back wall, with the hall on the right hand, cut off from the passage by the screen, with the kitchen and other offices on the left: the parlour (or 'solar') at the other end of the hall, by the side of the stairs, with cellar under; all of which was of the smallest and least pretentious work. Then, a comparatively few years later, the large square parlour was built with the tapestry room over, in loftier range, and in a style clearly showing the Renaissance influence, chiefly marked by the two large fire-places, and the small classically shaped windows in the gables of attics in the roofs.

"No unprejudiced person could read the last chapter of 'News from Nowhere' without being obliged to allow that W.M. had read the influences of the beautiful place in its entirety clearly, and without transformation by imagination; the real wanting no fanciful improvement. The price he paid for this joy in the house and all lying about it was the shadow of the coming change which overhung it: no efforts on his part—and they were many—could stay the piecemeal fungus-growth of disease in building which had begun to eat into the fringe of the surroundings: for each inevitable new element of change had tenfold brutal force in its vulgarization from the collected purity and simplicity on which it was settling down."

The country in which Kelmscott lies is among the sleepiest and loneliest of southern England. With little bold or striking beauty, it has a charm of unequalled subtlety and lastingness. The young Thames winds through level pastures, among low surrounding hills, in a landscape that seems as if little change had passed over it since the English settlement. Beyond the level and often flooded river-meadows the ground rises imperceptibly northwards towards the spurs of