I had begun to loosen rhythm as an
escape from rhetoric, and from that emotion of the crowd that
rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that
I must, for my special purpose, use nothing but the common syntax. A
couple of years later I would not have written that first line with
its conventional archaism--'Arise and go'--nor the inversion in the
last stanza. Passing another day by the new Law Courts, a building
that I admired because it was Gothic,--'It is not very good,' Morris
had said, 'but it is better than any thing else they have got and so
they hate it.'--I grew suddenly oppressed by the great weight of
stone, and thought, 'There are miles and miles of stone and brick
all round me,' and presently added, 'If John the Baptist, or his
like, were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he could make
all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their buildings
empty,' and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now, so
enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a
few days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of
_Poggio's Liber Facetiarum_ or the _Hypneroto-machia_ of _Poliphili_
for a publisher; I forget which, for I copied both; and returned
very pale to my troubled family.
Pages:
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62