Somewhat abashed we retraced our steps; we got one glimpse of the fine indented front, with its shapely wings and projections.  I should like to have seen the great parlour, and the tapestry-room with the story of Samson that bothered Rossetti so over his work.  I should like to have seen the big oak bed, with its hangings embroidered with one of Morris’s sweetest lyrics: 

     “The wind’s on the wold,
      And the night is a-cold.”

I should like to have seen the tapestry-chamber, and the room where Morris, who so frankly relished the healthy savour of meat and drink, ate his joyful meals, and the peacock yew-tree that he found in his days of failing strength too hard a task to clip.  I should like to have seen all this, I say; and yet I am not sure that tables and chairs, upholsteries and pictures, would not have come in between me and the sacred spirit of the place.

So I turned to the church.  Plain and homely as its exterior is, inside it is touched with the true mediaeval spirit, like the “old febel chapel” of the Mort d’Arthur.  Its bare walls, its half-obliterated frescoes, its sturdy pillars, gave it an ancient, simple air.  But I did not, to my grief, see the grave of Morris, though I saw in fancy the coffin brought from Lechlade in the bright farm-waggon, on that day of pitiless rain.  For there was going on in the churchyard the only thing I saw that day that seemed to me to strike a false note; a silly posing of village girls, self-conscious and overdressed, before the camera of a photographer—­a playing at aesthetics, bringing into the village life a touch of unwholesome vanity and the vulgar affectation of the world.  That is the ugly shadow of fame; it makes conventional people curious about the details of a great man’s life and surroundings, without initiating them into any sympathy with his ideals and motives.  The price that the real worshippers pay for their inspiration is the slavering idolatry of the unintelligent; and I withdrew in a mournful wonder from the place, wishing I could set an invisible fence round the scene, a fence which none should pass but the few who had the secret and the key in their hearts.

And here, for the pleasure of copying the sweet words, let me transcribe a few sentences from Morris’s own description of the house itself: 

“A house that I love with a reasonable love, I think; for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it:  some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much, let us hope) of common-sense, a liking for making materials serve one’s turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment—­ this, I think, was what went to the making of the old house.”

And again: