Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/741

332 of it; a mournful place, but full of character. I was there some twenty-five years ago; and found I remembered it perfectly.

"By the way, there was a review of the Wood"—his romance of "The Wood beyond the World," which had been issued from the Kelmscott Press the year before, and of which an ordinary edition had recently been published—"in last week's Spectator, which was kind and polite, but amused me very much by assuming that it was a Socialist allegory of Capital and Labour! It was written with such an air of cock-certainty that I thought people might think that I had told the reviewer myself; so I wrote a note to explain that he was wrong."

During this summer the gradual failure of Morris's strength became clearly noticeable. Languor insensibly stole over him. "It is sad," Sir Edward Burne-Jones wrote in autumn, "to see his enormous vitality diminishing." He was less ready' for any active expeditions, and began to suffer from sleeplessness. In summer mornings it had long been a luxury with him to be awakened at dawn by the first birds and then fall asleep again; but now that first waking was not always succeeded by a second sleep, and he often, even when summer passed into winter, got up at three or four o'clock and sat down to write at one of his prose tales in order to pass the time. He found that the clipping of a yew dragon which had been for some years in progress under the gable of the tapestry-room at Kelmscott was too fatiguing a task for him. His country walks became shorter in their range, and fishing was almost given up. "Ellis was with us for three days," he writes at the beginning of August, "and took me fishing every day: I did not much want to go, but I daresay it did me good." Even