Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/761

352 Mr. Cockerell was ceaseless in his zeal and care; and Mr. Emery Walker nursed him with the patience and tenderness of a woman. On the morning of Saturday the 3rd of October, between eleven and twelve o'clock, he died quietly and without visible suffering.

No man on earth dies before his day: and least of all can the departure be called premature of a man whose life had been so crowded in activity and so rich in achievement. To one judging by the work done in it, his working day was longer and ampler than often falls to the lot of our brief and pitiable human race. But the specific reasons why that life was not protracted beyond its sixty-third year are not difficult to assign. On the paternal side of his family there was a marked neurotic and gouty tendency. Himself of powerful physique, deep-chested, sound-lunged, big-hearted, he yet carried in him that family weakness, which was developed under the pressure of an immensely busy life. On a constitution made sensitive by gout, the exposure of the years of the Socialist crusade, when he had perpetually spoken in the open air in all weathers, and in the worse than open air of indoor meetings, and had often neglected or forgone proper food and rest, told with fatal effect. "I have no hesitation," his family doctor writes to me, "in saying that he died a victim to his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of Socialism." Yet this was only the special form that, in those years, his unceasing and prodigious activity had taken: and these words may be enlarged or supplemented by those of an eminent member of the same profession:

"I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."

"Remembering those early years," says Sir Edward