CHAPTER III
FIRST MEETING WITH MORRIS
Long before I first met William Morris, or had any notion of what manner of man he was personally, my imagination had invested him with a somewhat mysterious glamour, and he loomed as a star of large but misty splendour on my mind's horizon. When deep in poetry reading in my earlier manhood days, his name was familiar to me as the author of 'The Earthly Paradise' and 'Jason,' though as yet the only work of his that I had read—the only one I could find in any public library in Glasgow at that time—was 'Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond.' I knew also that, besides being a poet of acknowledged high rank, he was famed in art circles as a designer and reformer of the decorative arts, but I had seen none of his designs, and had little idea of what was the nature of his craftsmanship. In the Athenæum, the Literary World, and the architectural journals, I had seen occasional allusions to his poetry, art-work, and art lectures, and from these sources I further gathered that he was reckoned a man of uncommon mould among men of genius; something of a prophet or heresiarch as well as a poet and artist. What the nature of his propagandism was, I did not know. A vague something, however, about him, or rather about his repute, gave me the feeling that on fuller knowledge I should approve and warmly admire him. I surmised that I should discover in him one who, somewhere on the higher altitudes of literature and art, was striking out towards new hopes and endeavours for mankind.
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