et those prose
romances that became after his death so great a joy that they were the
only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to
the end. It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to
him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded
me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and
joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very
high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if
some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry
and all, rather than my own or any other man's. A reproduction of his
portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece with Henley's, and those of
other friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming
beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian's "Ariosto," while the broad
vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain
sane, though it give itself to every phantasy: the dreamer of the middle
ages. It is "the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill," the resolute
European image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionless meditation, and
has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry
speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain famous
Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic change,
that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he
called his Hamlet "fat" and even "scant of breath," he thrust between his
fingers agile rapier and dagger.

The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with
other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so
knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by
speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and
whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if
style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them
otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of
Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof
were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction,
that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly.

The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man
of great physical strength and extremely irascible--did he not fling a
badly baked