In a remarkable passage in News from Nowhere, Hammond, the wise old teacher who guides Morris through the new society, reflects on the world after the revolution with an erotic, almost sacramental joy. “The spirit of the new days, of our days,” he muses, is “delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves.”
