Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/586

ÆT. 53] book which is very interesting, Russian Epic Songs to wit. The smoke hung low on Edinburgh, so that the mountains looked like strong outlines against the sky, and the ugly detail of the houses was a good deal bidden: so that there was something very fine about the whole view from the Castle Hill, to which I wandered before getting into the church where our window is. Our window is fine, and looks a queer contrast with its glittering jewel-like colour to the daubs about it. There is no station hotel at Edinburgh, so I had to make a shot at one, and it was a bad one too; dull and not over clean. It was quite respectable however, although its dulness was relieved by a sudden fight between the head waiter and a quarrelsome gentleman more or less in liquor. The waiter got the best of it and quite deserved to do so, as far as I could see. It was a curious piece of drama to note the attempts of the quarrelsome gentleman to get away with some kind of dignity, while his old antagonist, become the polite waiter again, brushed past him taking other people's orders."

Already literature both in prose and verse was filling up his mind. At the end of October he was full of new projects: "it really would be rather convenient to me to have a little gout in order to do some literary work." One of these projects, never carried out, was to rewrite and complete the fragments of the poem which had appeared in the Commonweal under the title of "The Pilgrims of Hope." The first half of the Odyssey was nearly completed. And he had begun to write the flower of his prose romances, the work into which he put his most exquisite descriptions and his deepest thoughts on human life, "The Dream of John Ball." It also was first published in the Commonweal, beginning in the number for the 13th