Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/771

362 of high romance which coloured all he ever thought or did. In him this turn of mind had all the seriousness, though not the lack of balance, that is associated with the name of Quixotry. Seriousness was what lay deepest of all in him; and the comparison which clings most intimately, of all the many made, in sport or in earnest, by his friends, is one incidentally and lightly dropped, only a few months before his death, by one for whom familiarity had not dulled the edge of observation. The figure seen by him one evening, in the cloak and satchel, the soft hat pulled down over his eyes and the stick firmly grasped and held point forward as he walked straight on, seeming to see nothing of all that was round him—yet in fact seeing it and taking it all in with incomparable swiftness—through the glare and bustle of the Strand, was like one other person and one only, Christian passing through Vanity Fair.

That seriousness and simplicity of mind, even more than the less approachable and intelligible qualities of his lonely genius, was what held his friends to him with a strength of attachment that neither his own inner remoteness nor his swift turns from one interest to another could loosen. They often had a sense of being dragged at his heels, perplexed and out of breath; but they felt through it all that to his own eyes the way lay perfectly straight forward. "He led us all a dance," one of his closest friends said to me in speaking of one of those times when, without troubling himself to give much explanation, or to break his new departure gently to his panting followers, he swung rapidly round on a new front—"not for the first or last time: would he could lead us some more!" For as long as he lived those who knew him felt confident that he would be in the fullest sense, and at every