may have been like the drying of the
moon? Morris rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and
he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at
supper, "Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not
come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being
understood." He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that
night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only
gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for
the better.

XIV

I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been
delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some
necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the
catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often
walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series
of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-stories and, for an
American publisher, a two-volume selection from the Irish novelists that
would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more
than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some twelve
pounds ("O, Mr. E.," said publisher to editor, "you must never again pay
so much!") and for the second twenty, but I did not think myself badly
paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes.

Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of
Ireland the greater part of every year, and was but keeping my mind upon
what I knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I believed that if
Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew
him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his
childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his _Prometheus_, or some
equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more
intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and had
given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of
ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British
Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine figures, all unlike the Grecian
athletes and Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the
middle of the crowd's applause, or sit above measuring it out
unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an
unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, rack