ers in her
girdle grow young again by the touch of her hand, are of the kin of the
wood woman. All his bad women too and his half-bad women are of her kin.
The evils their enchantments make are a disordered abundance like that of
weedy places and they are cruel as wild creatures are cruel and they have
unbridled desires. One finds these evils in their typical shape in that
isle of the Wondrous Isles, where the wicked witch has her pleasure-house
and her prison, and in that 'isle of the old and the young,' where until
her enchantment is broken second childhood watches over children who never
grow old and who seem to the bystander who knows their story 'like images'
or like 'the rabbits on the grass.' It is as though Nature spoke through
him at all times in the mood that is upon her when she is opening the
apple-blossom or reddening the apple or thickening the shadow of the
boughs, and that the men and women of his verse and of his stories are all
the ministers of her mood.

IV

When I was a child I often heard my elders talking of an old turreted
house where an old great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens and its
long pond where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day
somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old
house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years
and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and I am
not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first dozen
verses of _Golden Wings_ that begin--

'Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.

Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.

On the bricks the green moss grew,
Yellow lichen on the stone,
Over which red apples shone;
Little war that castle knew.'

When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his
description poetical, it is always, I think, some house that he would
have liked to have lived in, and I remember him saying about the time when
he was writing of that great house of the Wolfings, 'I decorate modern
houses for people, but the house that would please me would be some great
room where one talked to one's friends in one corner and eat in another
and slept in another and worked in another.' Indeed all he writes seems to
me like the ma