| | 1 | Author: | Morris, William | Add | | | Title: | A Dream of John Ball and a King's Lesson  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | SOMETIMES I am rewarded for fretting myself so much about
present matters by a quite unasked-for pleasant dream. I mean
when I am asleep. This dream is as it were a present of an
architectural peep-show. I see some beautiful and noble building
new made, as it were for the occasion, as clearly as if I were
awake; not vaguely or absurdly, as often happens in dreams, but
with all the detail clear and reasonable. Some Elizabethan house
with its scrap of earlier fourteenth-century building, and its
later degradations of Queen Anne and Silly Billy{A} and Victoria,
marring but not destroying it, in an old village
once a clearing
amid the sandy woodlands of Sussex. Or an old and unusually
curious church, much churchwardened, and beside it a fragment of
fifteenth-century domestic architecture amongst the not
unpicturesque lath and plaster of an Essex farm, and looking
natural enough among the sleepy elms and the meditative hens
scratching about in the litter of the farmyard, whose trodden
yellow straw comes up to the very jambs of the richly carved
Norman doorway of the church. Or sometimes 'tis a splendid
collegiate church, untouched by restoring parson and architect,
standing amid an island of shapely trees and flower-beset
cottages of thatched grey stone and cob, amidst the narrow
stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the
sweeping Wiltshire downs, so well beloved of William Cobbett. Or
some new-seen and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey
village of the upper Thames over
topped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth-century church; or
even sometimes the very buildings of the past untouched by the
degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows
not of beauty and history: as once, when I was journeying (in a
dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the
Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of
the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a
clear-seen mediæval town standing up with roof and tower and
spire within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the
days of its builders of old. All this I have seen in the dreams
of the night clearer than I can force myself to see them in
dreams of the day. So that it would have been nothing new to me
the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were
all, and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell
me after I had fallen asleep. I had begun my sojourn in the Land
of Nod by a
very confused attempt to conclude that it was all right for me to
have an engagement to lecture at Manchester and Mitcham Fair
Green at half-past eleven at night on one and the same Sunday,
and that I could manage pretty well. And then I had gone on to
try to make the best of addressing a large open-air audience in
the costume I was really then wearing—to wit, my night-shirt,
reinforced for the dream occasion by a pair of braceless
trousers. The consciousness of this fact so bothered me, that
the earnest faces of my audience—who would
not notice it, but were clearly preparing
terrible anti-Socialist posers for me—began to fade away and my
dream grew thin, and I awoke (as I thought) to find myself lying
on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a
country village. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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