How, then, should not this corner of the world, which he loved so dearly, speak to the spirit with a voice and an accent far louder and more urgent than its own tranquil habit of sunny peace and green-shaded sweetness!  “You know my faith,” wrote Morris from Kelmscott in a bewildered hour, “and how I feel I have no sort of right to revenge myself for any of my private troubles on the kind earth; and here I feel her kindness very specially, and am bound not to meet it with a long face.”  Noble and high-hearted words! for he of all men seemed made by nature to enjoy security and beauty and the joys of living, if ever man was so made.  His very lack of personal sensitiveness, his unaptness to be moved by the pathetic appeal of the individual, might have been made a shield for his own peace; but he laid that shield down, and bared his breast to the sharp arrows; and in his noble madness to redress the wrongs of the world he was, perhaps, more like one of his great generous knights than he himself ever suspected.

This, then, I think is the reason why this place—­a grey grange at the end of a country lane, among water meadows—­has so ample a call for the spirit.  A place of which Morris wrote, “The scale of everything of the smallest, but so sweet, so unusual even; it was like the background of an innocent fairy-story.”  Yes, it might have been that!  Many of the simplest and quietest of lives had been lived there, no doubt, before Morris came that way.  But with him came a realisation of its virtues, a perception that in its smallness and sweetness it yet held imprisoned, like the gem that sits on the smallest finger of a hand, an ocean of light and colour.  The two things that lend strength to life are, in the first place, an appreciation of its quality, a perception of its intense and awful significance—­the thought that we here hold in our hands, if we could but piece it all together, the elements and portions of a mighty, an overwhelming problem.  The fragments of that mighty mystery are sorrow, sin, suffering, joy, hope, life, death.  Things of their nature sharply opposed, and yet that are, doubtless, somehow and somewhere, united and composed and reconciled.  It is at this sad point that many men and most artists stop short.  They see what they love and desire; they emphasise this and rest upon it; and when the surge of suffering buffets them away, they drown, bewildered, struggling for breath, complaining.

But for the true man it is otherwise.  He is penetrated with the desire that all should share his joy and be emboldened by it.  It casts a cold shadow over the sunshine, it mars the scent of the roses, it wails across the cooing of the doves—­the sense that others suffer and toil unhelped; and still more grievous to him is the thought that, were these duller natures set free from the galling yoke, their mirth would be evil and hideous, they would have no inkling of the sweeter and the purer joy.  And then, if he be wise, he tries his hardest, in slow and wearied