Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/606

ÆT. 54] But Lord! if I lived there, what a state of terror I should be in lest they should begin to build up round about. There is a beautiful pile of old barns fronting it which does not belong to Flower, but to a man who thinks that he looks upon them as an eyesore and wants to buy them to pull them down; and therefore he keeps them up, in order to stimulate Flower to bid a higher price for the land than it is worth."

"I have now" (August 25th) "committed the irremediable error of finishing the Odyssey, all but a little bit of fair-copying. I am rather sad thereat."

"It is a beautiful bright autumn morning here, as fresh as daisies: and I am not over-inclined for my morning preachment at Walham Green, but go I must, as also to Victoria Park in the afternoon. I had a sort of dastardly hope that it might rain. Mind you, I don't pretend to say that I don't like it in some way or other, when I am on my legs. I fear I am an inveterate word-spinner and not good for much else."

"I had three very good days at Kelmscott" (in September): "once or twice I had that delightful quickening of perception by which everything gets emphasized and brightened, and the commonest landscape looks lovely; anxieties and worrits, though remembered, yet no weight on one's spirits—Heaven in short. It comes not very commonly even in one's younger and brighter days, and doesn't quite leave one even in the times of combat."

Late in that autumn was produced the most singular of all Morris's literary adventures, the little play entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened." "I have been writing," he says on the 24th of September, "a—what?—an 'interlude' let's call it, to be acted at Farringdon Road for the benefit of Common-