This, then, I think is the reason why this place--a grey grange at
the end of a country lane, among water meadows--has so ample a call
for the spirit. A place of which Morris wrote, "The scale of
everything of the smallest, but so sweet, so unusual even; it was
like the background of an innocent fairy-story." Yes, it might have
been that! Many of the simplest and quietest of lives had been
lived there, no doubt, before Morris came that way. But with him
came a realisation of its virtues, a perception that in its
smallness and sweetness it yet held imprisoned, like the gem that
sits on the smallest finger of a hand, an ocean of light and
colour. The two things that lend strength to life are, in the first
place, an appreciation of its quality, a perception of its intense
and awful significance--the thought that we here hold in our hands,
if we could but piece it all together, the elements and portions of
a mighty, an overwhelming problem. The fragments of that mighty
mystery are sorrow, sin, suffering, joy, hope, life, death.
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