of the tree," were
from her needle, though not from her design. She worked for the first few
months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot
always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the
report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some
worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if
their marriage or death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known
was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organisation and
beauty, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and
people loved him as children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood
became gradually occupied with him or about his affairs, and, without any
wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I
remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted
Morris's thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation
delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne: "O,
Swinburne," said Morris, "is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and
Chaucer, for they make pictures." "Does not Milton make pictures?" asked
my informant. "No," was the answer, "Dante makes pictures, but Milton,
though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician."
"Great earnest mind" sounded strange to me, and I doubt not that were his
questioner not a simple man Morris had been more violent. Another day the
same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was worse, and Morris
cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with foreign words.

He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech,
which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his
burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and
expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some
beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. "Balzac! Balzac!" he said
to me once, "oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a
few years ago." I can remember him at supper praising wine: "Why do people
say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the
sunlight and the sap?" and his dispraising houses decorated by himself:
"Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big
barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the
third corner, and in the fourth received one's friends"; and his
com