Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/404

ÆT. 45] in its garden the inventor of the electric telegraph, Francis Ronalds, had in 1816 laid eight miles of insulated wires charged with static electricity, and worked by electrometers and synchronized rotating discs at either end. Fragments of his apparatus, the first electric communication ever practically worked, are still preserved in the South Kensington Museum. When Morris took it, it had just been vacated by Dr. George Macdonald, and was known as The Retreat; this name, as rather suggestive of a private asylum, he at once changed, and called it Kelmscott House, after his other home on the bank of the same river. The hundred and thirty miles of stream between the two houses were a real, as well as an imaginative, link between them. He liked to think that the water which ran under his windows at Hammersmith had passed the meadows and grey gables of Kelmscott; and more than once a party of summer voyagers went from one house to the other by water, embarking at their own door in London and disembarking in their own meadow at Kelmscott. "The situation," he wrote of it to his wife at Oneglia, "is certainly the prettiest in London (you may mock at this among the olives beside the Midland Sea): the house could easily be done up at a cost of money: the long drawing-room, with a touch of my art, could be made one of the prettiest in London: the garden is really most beautiful. If you come to think of it, you will find that you won't get a garden or a house with much character unless you go out about as far as the Upper Mall. I don't think that either you or I could stand a quite modern house in a street: I don't fancy going back among the bugs of Bloomsbury."

Kelmscott House was taken from Midsummer, and the Morrises moved into it at the end of October.