William Morris, His Art, His Writings, and His Public Life; A Record baixar o livro de graça

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THREE: EARLY ART AND POETRY. ESTABLISHED in town with his friend Edward Burne-Jones; at an age when, on looking back after ten or eleven years, he deemed himself as having been pretty much a boy, it was only natural that Morris should begin to enlarge his circle of literary and artistic acquaintances. In a letter to William Bell Scott in 1875, acknowledging the gift of a book of verse by that writer, Morris refers to these early days and thanks him for the poems that I first found so sympathetic when I came up to London year's ago. Rossetti, who was the means of introducing Morris to Ruskin and other well-known artists and literary men, writes thus to Bell Scott in the spring of the year 1857: Two young men, projectors of ' The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, ' have recently come to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. (How commonplace a sound has this introductory mention, and how little suggestive of the celebrity they were ultimately to attain !) They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the University generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Durer's finest works; and Morris, though without practice as yet, has no less power, I fancy. He has written some really wonderful poetry too. That the powers of the two men were very distinct is the judgment which, when Bell Scott came to know them, himself formed and left on record in his Autobiographical Notes. Morris now set to work in real earnest, the preparation of his first volume of poems occupying no small portion of his time and attention. Nevertheless, he did not devote his energies exclusively...