Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/311

THE FIRST MORRIS 285 There were five swans that ne'er did eat The water weeds, for ladies came Each day, and young knights did the same, And gave them cakes and bread for meat. They had a house of painted wood, A red roof gold-spiked over it. Wherein upon their eggs to sit Week after week. . . . It is a country as actual to him as Essex — for it is constructed only of such materials as his five senses had encountered ; of anything in the fabric of the original region which they could not touch and test, he had remained quite unaware. *' My business in life," he wrote in one of the earnest letters of his youth, '* is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another." Had he written "other men's dreams" it would have been the perfect definition of his work. Groping through all literature thus rudely — reading, so to say, by touch — he achieved a kind of infallible filtration, and sifted, out of verse and prose and pictures far disparted, an element common to them all. From sagas and from fairy-tales, from Grimm as from Rossetti, he raked brilhant solids only, all akin ; and so could mix them with impunity, towers from this and knights from that : setting, for ex- ample, (in The Chapel) a figure out of Malory moving securely in a landscape skimmed off the mirror of The Lady of Shalott. Before he can feel that he has really captured the emotion, the idea, before he can feel certain that it is safely and legibly printed on his page, he must weight it with shape and substance, translate it into terms of "gold, marble, purple — brilliance, solidity, colour." Speech is made a muscular, rather than a mental, process — something to be seen as well as heard — a