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. I had lived upon bread and tea
because I thought that if antiquity found locust and wild honey
nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need no better. I was always
planning some great gesture, putting the whole world into one scale
of the balance and my soul into the other, and imagining that the
whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty years have
passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave the
metropolis without some like stimulant; and all, after two or three,
or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood
that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little diligent sedentary
stitches as though we were making lace. I had one unmeasured
advantage from my stimulant: I could ink my socks, that they might
not show through my shoes, with a most haughty mind, imagining
myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in some far place 'under
the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows.'