Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/488

ÆT. 49] ting the case too strongly to say that for the time they thoroughly shattered his nerve, though the private correspondence in which this appears is neither meant nor suited for a wider public.

This household anxiety coloured all the world to him: and even Kelmscott that year could not charm away his melancholy. The sense of change seemed brooding everywhere, and a dim shadow of unhappiness clung about the "sweet-looking clean waterside." He felt it even at Godstow, "less changed than any beautiful place I know, the very fields that stretch up to Wytham much the same as they always were with their wealth of poplar and willow trees, the most beautiful meadows to be seen anywhere.""So it will be," he goes on, "till civilized life is quite changed, every alteration in the material world will be for the worse."

The same desperate concentration of mind, the feeling of one thing, and one thing alone, being needful, reappears in another letter which is one of the extremely rare instances of his criticism of a contemporary writer. It was written soon after the publication of Mr. Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonnesse."

"As to the poem, I have made two or three attempts to read it, but have failed, not being in the mood I suppose: nothing would lay hold of me at all. This is doubtless my own fault, since it certainly did seem very fine. But, to confess and be hanged, you know I never could really sympathize with Swinburne's work; it always seemed to me to be founded on literature, not on nature. In saying this I really cannot accuse myself of any jealousy on the subject, as I think also you will not. Now I believe that Swinburne's sympathy with literature is most genuine and complete; and it is a pleasure to hear him talk