passed during his career as a Socialist. Accustomed to
find his thoughts and actions misconstrued by those who,
with little pains, might have understood them, he realized
his loneliness with a touching pathos:
                         "I have had a life of insults,"
he once said.
                         Again, in a private letter, he
wrote on New Year's Day, 1881 :
                         "I have of late been somewhat
melancholy. . . . When one is just so much sub-
dued, one is apt to turn more specially from thinking of
one's own affairs to more worthy matters; and my mind
is very full of the great change, which I hop, is slowly
coming over the world. Nor will you perhaps think it
ceremonious or superstitious, if I try to join thoughts with
you to-day mi writing a word of hope for the new year;
that it may do a good turn of work toward the abasement
of the rich and the raising up of the poor, which is of all
things most to be longed for; till people can, at last, rub
out from their dictionaries altogether these dreadful words:
RICH and POOR."
                         Four years later, a sense of
despair seems to have stolen over him, after one of his
visits to the East End of London. He writes:
                         4"On Sunday, I went a-preach-
ing Stepney way. My visit intensely depressed me, as
these Eastward visits always do; the mere stretch of
houses, the vast mass of utter shabbiness and uneventful-
ness, sits upon one like a nightmare. You would perhaps
have smiled at my congregation; some twenty people in
a little room. . . . It is a great drawback that I can't
talk to them roughly and unaffectedly. I don't seem to
have got at them yet-you see this GREAT CLASS
GULF lies between us."
                         In the effort to make plain the
intense, lonely and lofty personality of William Morris,
we are, perhaps, losing sight of his evolution as a Socialist.


W"ILLIAM MORRIS


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