Into the morning room. Walk. Six paces. // The window at its diagonal. Nine more steps. // Parting the nets, you see: the sloped lawn, the billowing verdant cloud of the trees, the slate grey Mersey. Any industry at its shore is 'ruralised by distance' in the Romantic conceit. That other blue distance of the Welsh mountains. Or hills. Now you turn back to the room. Side on to the tall windows of Holt's Mersey view. Curtain dropped. Least resistance. Look straight through two open doors. Through. Into the dining room. To the drawing room. The long view. Windows. The horse chestnut tree

Slit the morning post with a keen knife beneath the woodblock variegations of the wallpaper, the Pre-Raphaelite dazzle. The tin-crackle voices of Tennyson Browning haunt the room

(play brief passage of the recording of Browning

Today's lesson is the dust that rises off a beaten carpet. A knocked up bit of greatness

Build on the ruins of Sodom. Mumbling clerics. As you are drawn through the Temple to the double towers beyond. The megalomaniac stare. Into futurity. Without even a Fra Filippo Lippi wink at you. A startling huge eye looms in the lens. A falcon dives. Rips into the neck of the dove of this premature Transfiguration

Bays picked to shreds. As though a wish could fall true on this marble set. The startled schoolgirl threads beads. Books dropped to one side. Roses scattering the tiles at her bare feet. She's putting it on taking it off. Knees and breasts ghosted through her thin robes

A broken hand on a keyboard of too many naturals. A fantasia of black and white tuned up to allegory. Unplayable. It's always the Moment Before. Here. Catastrophe poised as a sponge of poison squeezed into your limpid pool. Ruined columns and the same blue hills. In degrees of collapse. Will build it up again. As 'art'

Pass. The tall windows. On. Into the dining room. Nine paces. //