Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/691

282 mittee of the Arts and Crafts Society and in the Art Workers' Guild, records, as the deepest impression made on him, that of Morris's extraordinary patience and conciliatoriness: and the same testimony is borne by others who worked along with him. "O how I long to keep the world from narrowing me, and to look at things bigly and kindly!" Thus he had written, in a letter of more than usually intimate self-revelation, nearly twenty years before: and the prayer had been heard. Like the southern autumn of Virgil, the year remained fruitful in its mellow decline:

The Kelmscott Press remained until towards the end of these years his engrossing preoccupation. Next to it in his interest were his own romances. He had practically ceased to write original poetry. As to one of these tales indeed, that entitled "Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair," he wavered for some time whether he should write it in verse or prose, and actually began it in verse, but quickly gave it up. He announced this decision to Burne-Jones the next time they met, observing at the same time, in what is perhaps the most sweeping of all his generalizations, that poetry was tommy rot. But the prose romances all contain snatches of lyric verse, and besides his metrical rendering of "Beowulf," other verse, original and translated, was written by him now and again. Foremost perhaps in beauty among these lyrics of later summer, and deserving to be reclaimed here from the obscure pages of the Catalogue of the fourth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, are the verses which he wrote for an embroidered hanging, designed