During the intervening months efforts to find other work resulted through the kindness of Mr. George Lillie Craik in a temporary post held for six months in the Fine Art Society’s Gallery in Bond Street. It was the proposal of the Directors to form a section dealing with old German and English Engravings and Etchings, and that William should be put in charge of it; and that meanwhile, during the six months, he should make a special study of the subject, learn certain business details to make him more efficient. The work and the prospect were a delightful change after the distasteful grind at the Bank, and he threw himself into the necessary studies with keen relish.
In the autumn he spent two months in Scotland, visiting his mother, and other relatives, Mr. W. Bell Scott, and his old friend Sir Noel Paton.
From Lanarkshire he wrote in September to me and to Rossetti.
... Yesterday I spent some hours in a delicious ramble over the moors and across a river toward a distant fir wood, where I lay down for a time, beside the whispering waters, seeing nothing but a semicircle of pines, a wall of purple moorland, the brown water gurgling and splashing and slowly moving over the mossy stones, and above a deep cloudless blue sky—and hearing nothing but the hum of a dragonfly, the summery sound of innumerable heather-bees, and the occasional distant bleat of a sheep or sudden call of a grouse. I lay there in a kind of trance of enjoyment—half painful from intensity. I drank in not only the beauty of what I have just described, but also every little and minute thing that crossed my vision—a cluster of fir-needles hanging steel-blue against the deeper colour of the sky, a wood-dove swaying on a pine-bough like a soft gray and purple blossom, a white butterfly clinging to a yellow blossom heavy with honey, a ray of sunlight upon a bunch of mountain-ash berries making their scarlet glow with that almost terrible red which is as the blood of God in the sunsets one sometimes sees, a dragonfly poised like a flame arrested in its course, a little beetle stretching its sharded wings upon a gray stone, a tiny blue morsel of a floweret between two blades of grass looking up with, I am certain, a _sense_ of ecstatic happiness to the similar skies above—all these and much more I drank in with mingled pain and rejoicing. At such times I seem to become a part of nature—the birds seem when they sing to say things in a no longer unfamiliar speech—nor do they seem too shy to approach quite close to me. Even bees and wasps I do not brush away when they light upon my hands or face, and they never sting me, for I think they know that I would not harm them. I feel at these rare and inexpressibly happy times as a flower must feel after morning dew when the sun comes forth in his power, as a pine tree when a rising wind makes its boughs quiver with melodious pain, as a wild wood-bird before it begins to sing, its heart being too full for music.... O why weren’t you there?