It is different with the valley of the Thames, that little stream which begins a short way above Oxford and meanders between banks of lush grass and bending willows, down through Marlow, where musty ales have long been made, past Windsor between the Great Park and the Chiltern Hills, through Richmond and so down to Hammersmith where one might perhaps ford the river at low tide if an iron bridge did not carry one across, till below the city of London the estuary becomes a wide tide of water and expands proudly to meet the sea. Nature has carved this valley to the human scale: the houses are not dwarfed by the landscape; and except for the huge warren of London--for which nature is not responsible--there is a fitness between the actor and the scene which, without offering any great Olympian moments, gives the naïve and jolly and whole-hearted effect that one finds in a good English hunting print or, let us say, in Pickwick Papers. In such an atmosphere, particularly as one thinks of it on a day late in June, human nature bubbles naturally into good nature, and whatever harshness remains, a tankard of ale will drain away. It is in this valley of the Thames that William Morris awoke to find his utopia, after returning to his home in Hammersmith, the last really urban borough of London as one goes upstream. From that landscape, sweetened and freshened and ridden of cockney landmarks, Morris evokes the spirit of the River God, as Socrates and Phædrus, by the banks of the Ilyssus, call forth the spirit of Pan. With all the grime and tedium of the dull ’eighties lying upon his soul, Morris finds himself transported to a world which has been cleansed by a revolution of a greater part of the nineteenth century landmarks. In the meanwhile, grass has laid a decent blanket over many irretrievable ruins. The house in which he has gone to bed is now a Guest House; and he is first received into this refurbished world by a boatman who takes him for a morning swim on the Thames, and knows about the value of money only as a collector of copper curios might. At breakfast, he finds himself among a group of friendly people, who call him “Guest”; and he is taken firmly and sweetly and quite serenely in hand by the comely young women who preside over the house. These women, like everyone else in the new Thames valley, are healthy, full-blooded, athletic, sane, and free from the puling maladies which idleness or overwork gave to the women of the nineteenth century. The other guests are a weaver who has come down from the north to take a turn at the boatman’s job while the latter goes up towards Oxford to help gather in the hay, and a loquacious dustman in marvellous greens and golds.