Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/309

THE FIRST MORRIS 283 indeed, may be called his distinguishing gift, the deciding element in his personality. It was upon its exercise that all his later activities were based; it both fed their scope and ruled their direction. It furnished him (as we shall see) with his philosophy both of art and of life, it was the source of all his desires and ideals ; it gave him his fecundity and his facility as a designer; it was the fountain that fed the chains of still pools he called his " tales." And it was certainly by its alchemy that the new magic in Cruenevere was acquired. For it enabled him to pillage all the poets without plagiarizing them, to copy Keats and Coleridge and Browning and Tennyson, as well as Malory and Froissart and Chaucer, without utter- ing one audible echo, and to give to a simple cento of their work the effect of " something entirely new, founded on nothing previous." Whenever their verse crystallized into vision it caught in his mind in coloured clusters like netted precious stones ; all the rest — music, metaphysic, intellectual vehicle — poured through unheeded. He stole the little landscapes reflected in the foam that hung and shook from the leaping fountain of Shelley's work ; but of the spirit that tossed and sustained it, even of the living water itself, he captured, he could capture, nothing. He took the castles that rose — all too rarely — on the clouds that Coleridge's intellect drew out of the air ; and left the irresolute wrack behind. He stripped Minster in Thanet when he was eight years old, and that "fifty years later, never having seen the church in the interval, he described it in detail from that recollection." We are also told how, in the days of the Firm, when they were manufacturing big church windows in premises disproportionately cramped, "his amazing eye and memory for colours enabled him to achieve the impossible : he could pass all the parts of a large window one by one before the light and never lose sight of the general tone of the colours or of the relation of one part to another."