Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/719

310 mediæval rebel and mystic and the modern Socialist joined hands over the white poppy-flower in the doubtful dusk between moonset and dawn. In such a vision, the prophetic soul of the world, dreaming on things to come, ranges disembodied and unconfined. The dreams which the present may have of an elusive or dimly-conjectured future, no less than those which the past may once have had of a future that is not the present, must be no rational human forecast, but a tale told, like the Vision of Er in Plato's "Republic," by one neither alive nor dead. In "News from Nowhere" he had, with a reversion to a simpler and less august sphere of imagination, clothed his own dream of a new age in the innocent draperies of a romantic pastoral. But the dreamer of dreams, the poet and romance-writer who habitually moved in a strange world of his own, was also a man of keen-sighted practical intelligence. When called on for action, he could dismiss all that world of dreams, or only retain from it that deeper insight and that wider outlook which is forbidden to men not endowed with the more than human gift of imaginative insight. The letter to the Daily Chronicle on the Miners' Question, his last and most profound public utterance on the future of human society and the meaning of human life, is the voice of one who had lived both in Plato's cave and in the upper air, and who could adjust his eye to both. From that upper world of ideal art and creative imagination—of real things, as Plato would say—he could turn to the confused and perplexing movement of shadows in the cavern spoken and thought of by men as the actual world, and see breaking over the darkness no mere fluctuating glow from a fire behind the prisoners, but the glimmer of actual day.

This letter, headed "The Deeper Meaning of the