Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/725

316 beauty; the countryside was one flame of flowers, and "the nightingales," as Morris put it to Burne-Jones after he came back, "O my wig, they were peppering into it." The effect of the visit may be clearly traced in an address which he gave, soon after his return to England, to the Ancoats Brotherhood at Manchester. The subject he chose to speak upon was "Town and Country." The greater part of the address was delivered without notes, and of that portion no trustworthy record has been preserved. But for the earlier portion a few pages of manuscript had been carefully written out: and the fragment is notable for the clearness of its historical view, and for the temperate practical ideal, which, not without reasonable hope, it sets up for a near future. It has also a direct autobiographic value from its personal touches, not only in the allusion to the Oxford of his own youth, but where he speaks of the havoc wrought in country villages by the wasteful neglect, or still worse by the destructive attention, of the modern landowner. In both cases he had in his mind actual instances in his own neighbourhood on the upper Thames. But beyond all, it sums up, with the ripeness of long experience, the instincts and beliefs which guided him in his view of what kind of human life was desirable, and possible, and a duty, in a naturally beautiful world.

"Town and country are generally put in a kind of contrast, but we will see what kind of a contrast there has been, is, and may be between them; how far that contrast is desirable or necessary, or whether it may not be possible in the long run to make the town a part of the country and the country a part of the towns. I think I may assume that, on the one hand, there is nobody here so abnormally made as not to take a pleasure in green fields, and trees, and rivers, and