24 Kelmscott Manor [1889 



Kelmscott to watch Morris's solicitude for this poor girl on whom his 

 chief home love was bestowed. 



Kelmscott Manor was a romantic house, and the life there extremely 

 primitive. There were few of the conveniences of modern life. The 

 rooms below and also on the upper floor were all passage rooms opening 

 one into another, and in order to reach the tapestried chamber in which 

 we sat in the evenings, it was necessary to pass to and fro through 

 Morris's own bedroom, in which he lay at night in a great square 

 Elizabethan four-post bed, an arrangement which would have been of 

 extreme discomfort to anyone less tolerant of such things than he, 

 and less indifferent to his personal convenience. It was the same thing 

 in the day time. He worked at the designs he was making for his 

 carpets, and at his drawings, and the corrections of his proofs in a 

 room where he was liable every minute to disturbance. Such discom- 

 forts had been submitted to by our forefathers, and why not, he 

 thought, by us. It was this insensitiveness to his surroundings that 

 enabled him to deal with the prodigious volume of work which he daily 

 assigned himself, both manual and intellectual. 



Such was the house. Out of doors the river — an upper branch of 

 the Thames — was a constant attraction, and there Morris each after- 

 noon took complete holiday. He loved boating, as it reminded him of 

 his Oxford days, and he loved sitting hour after hour in a punt with 

 rod and line, capturing the local gudgeon, a sport requiring skill, on 

 which he prided himself, not without modest reason. In all matters 

 concerning the river he took a passionate and proprietary interest, 

 cherishing a special grudge against the Thames Conservancy, a body 

 which interfered with individual rights, and whose legitimate authority 

 he denied. Against these he constantly inveighed. He loved, too, in 

 memory of Oxford, to engage in wordy warfare with the bargees, and 

 had a strong vocabulary of abuse for them which he did not spare. 

 When on the river he affected a rough manner even with his fellows 

 in the boat, and scorned to apologize if accidents through his fault 

 occurred, all which was in keeping with his appearance, which was that 

 of a Norwegian sea captain rather than a poet, and of this he was 

 proud. He was very dogmatic, with violent likes and dislikes. He 

 used to say that St. Peter's was the ugliest building in the world after 

 St. Paul's, and of these things he would discourse when the fish were 

 off their feed, for when they were biting he was too absorbed in his 

 catch to have a thought for anything else. 



Of poetry he affected to have little knowledge, and of the work of 

 those he was averse to, he would pretend never to have read a word. I 

 remember that on one boating excursion in which we all took part, we 

 were compelled to take refuge from heavy rain in a little inn by the 

 river side, and that we found in it a book of poetical extracts which we 



