plaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground railway: "If you must
have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube
with a cork at each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what led up
to his movement, he replied: "Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should
have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes." Though
I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued going there on
Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my
hand to some mediaeval work or other.

Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my _Wanderings of Usheen_
to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, and soon
after sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn--"You write my sort
of poetry," he said and began to praise me and to promise to send his
praise to _The Commonwealth_, the League organ, and he would have said
more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp post and
got very heated upon that subject.

I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of Morris's
lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris himself could
read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane to the matter. If
the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had,
in let us say "News from Nowhere," then running through _The
Commonwealth_, described such men and women, living under their natural
conditions, or as they would desire to live, then those conditions
themselves must be the norm and could we but get rid of certain
institutions the world would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris
himself justified himself in his own heart by as simple an argument, and
was, as the socialist D---- said to me one night, walking home after some
lecture, "an anarchist without knowing it." Certainly I and all about me,
including D---- himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's
pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary
socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and
Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D----.
During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit
of these mistakes must be left to "the Bourgeoisie"; and besides, when you
begin to talk of this measure, or that other, you lose sight of the goal,
and see, to reverse Swinburne's description of Tiresias, "Light on the way
but darkness on the goa