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whole story of the Niblungs, the great epic of the north, as it was then current in Scandinavia. Some of this is only a prose rendering of songs that still exist (damaged by gaps here and there) in the Poetic Edda, some is a similar rendering of poems then existing, now lost (except for the fragments preserved in the Völsunga), and the rest is no doubt got together from floating tradition. The story exists otherwise, first, in ballads, some Faroese, early and obviously taken straight from the Eddaic poems; some Danish, which latter are often more akin to the German than the Icelandic version; second, in the great German poem of the Nibelungen Noth, which differs so widely and so curiously from the Eddaic version that it will probably always be an open question whether the Germans had or had not a different original from the Scandinavians ; third, the story, much overlaid with additions is told in the Vilkina Saga, an Icelandic romance, so to say, of the 14th century, which takes the German account for the more part.

Morris's poem aims at making a complete story out of the elements which have formed these more or less incomplete and fragmentary works; in doing this it naturally sticks closest to the Icelandic form as both the completest and most artistic; but the German legend has also been used in the latter part.

But these works, although well appreciated, do not move the public like Morris's other works. It would seem that people receive a dismal impression of chill from the northern country, and would rather go for love stories to the more paradisaic realms of the East.

A man must write both rapidly and easily and with pleasure to himself before he can take up a poetical work of such magnitude as "The Earthly Paradise," in its three substantial volumes, and carry it through with such trifles thrown in in addition as several volumes from the hard Icelandic tongue, a rhymed rendering of the Eneid, and a regular avocation requiring unremitting personal attention. Another proof of Morris's peculiar ease in poetry is to be found in his preference to re-writing over tinkering anything with which he may have become dissatisfied.

He is not used to alter when he reprints. Some may "diligently revise and reshape," but if he is discontented with his work, he throws it aside and begins again. So it was, for instance, with a great part of "Sigurd"; so, as we have already named, with the prologue to "The Earthly Paradise." What we have is the second writing, and it is so fine that we cannot regret the destruction of the other if it led us to this. Indeed, perhaps we owe some of its effects to the intensification due to the author's disappointment over his first results. We quote this prologue or apology entire, for it is so fair a specimen of the author's style, so easy and yet so finished:

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,

I cannot ease the burden of your fears, Or make quick-coming death a little thing,

Or bring again the pleasure of past years,

Nor for my words shall ye forget your
tears,

Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather when, aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye
sigh,

And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,

Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet
days die-

Remember me a little then, I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.
The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down, who live and earn
our bread,

These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names remembered,
Because they, living not, can ne'er be
dead,

Or long time take their memory away
From us poor singers of an empty day.
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due
time,

Why should I strive to set the crooked
straight?

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It was happily remarked some few years ago that facts had well falsified Mr. Morris's description of himself as "Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time," seeing that his ready acceptance, or rather his immediate bound into a reputation, was proof enough of his arrival being very distinctly opportune.

No doubt poetry is in more or less of opposition to the average life of the present day; but when the poet comes who is its exact polar opposite by the law of contraries, he is bound to be welcomed. To all those who feel themselves out of tune with the times, he is the natural friend and companion. He brings in new light by seeing the darkness, and new colour by putting garish commonplace into shadow, and letting the gaiety and sweetness of old days fill our inner chamber for a little while. As a poet, he is essentially the bringer of beautiful things.

In the envoi to "The Earthly Paradise," the author sends his book for sympathy to "My master, Geoffry Chaucer," whose inspiration he thus He bids the book say:

owns.

-if indeed

In some old garden thou and I have wrought,
And made fresh flowers spring up from hoarded seed,
And fragrance of old days and deeds have brought

Back to folk weary; all was not for nought.

-No little part it was for me to play

The idle singer of an empty day."

We may here add a specimen of some of Morris's other work.

Here,

for instance, are the rolling lines that form the commencement of the

"Sigurd":

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;

Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;

Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors;
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate;
There the Gods were unforgotten, yea while they walked with men.
Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and again
Of the mid-ward time, and the fading, and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise.
We ought to be interested in these merry-hearted men, the heroes
indeed of our own Homeric period. We may note how in these poems
of the north the author is enabled meetly to revive noble and simple
Saxon forms of expression, for which we ought to be grateful to him.
The following may represent Morris's manner of translation from the
Latin (Æneid IV.). The rendering is very close, almost literal:

But Dido, trembling, wild at heart with her most dread intent,
Rolling her blood-shot eyes about, her quivering cheeks besprent
With burning flecks, and otherwhere dead-white with death drawn nigh,
Burst through the inner doorways there and clomb the bale on high;
Fulfilled with utter madness now, and bared the Dardan blade,
Gift given not for such a work, for no such ending made.
There, when upon the Ilian gear her eyen had been set,

And bed well known, 'twixt tears and thoughts awhile she lingered yet ;
Then, brooding low upon the bed, her latest word she spake.

"O raiment dear to me, while Gods and fate allowed, now take
This soul of mine and let me loose from all my woes at last!
I, I have lived, and down the way fate showed to me have passed;
And now a mighty shade of me shall go beneath the earth!
A glorious city have I raised, and brought my walls to birth,
Happy, ah happy, overmuch were all my life-days' gain,

If never those Dardanian keels had drawn our shores anigh."
She spake her lips lay on the bed.

:

"Ah, unavenged to die!
But let me die! Thus, thus 'tis good to go into the night!
Now let the cruel Dardan eyes drink in the bale-fire's light,
And bear for sign across the sea this token of my death."

In a careful study of Morris's poetry, made by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in "Our Living Poets," we find the following comparison of Chaucer and Morris, which is worth quotation as a piece of excellent critical work:

"Whether we read Chaucer or Mr. Morris, we get much the same processional splendour of descriptiveness where multitudes and largeness of action are concerned, the same minute yet significant delicacy of detail where individual action is the artist's subject, the same comprehensive attention to situation and surroundings, the same naïve implicitness of

belief where anything inconceivable to a modern mind is to be told (as is constantly the case with both poets). In this they are rivals, standing apart from all others, that they show a full sympathy with that stage of human development represented in each tale; and this is compassed partly by a forthright statement of the facts as they are supposed to have occurred, and partly by such an ingenuous and inventorial minuteness of circumstance as disarms all suspicion that the narrator questions the genuineness of his tale. Now this is the most indispensable quality to be sought for in simple tale-telling; and without this the utmost agreeableness of diction and the highest perfection of metre and rhythm are of no avail. We must not forget that this Chaucerian class of poetry is altogether unmodern, so that unless it reached in the hands of a contemporary artist such a perfection as it might attain in the social medium. wherein it first grew up, it could not receive more than a meagre recognition; and the cordial reception of Mr. Morris speaks volumes as to the quality of his tale-singing.

"It is natural that most of the characteristics of contemporary poetic workmanship should be at a minimum in these productions; and in the use of metres and so on we find Mr. Morris entirely estranged from his contemporaries. Instead of inventing new metres, he has adopted three good homely instruments used by Chaucer, the seven-line stanza of Troilus and Criseide,' 'The Flower and the Leaf,' and other poems, the old-fashioned five-foot couplet of The Knight's Tale,' used by Pope in translating the 'Iliad,' and the four-foot couplet of The Romaunt of the Rose' and 'The Book of the Duchess,' afterwards employed in the construction of Hudibras;' and of these instruments he has availed himself without that attention to minute construction shown in modern metres, or in pre-existent metres under modern treatment. We get here broad cadences of music, an unfaltering flow of rhythm, easy perspicuity of rhyme, fine large outlines of construction, but not usually any minute delicacies or startling intricacies; and this is precisely what should be the case, for this reason: Mr. Morris's works treat largely of action, incident, external form, colour, and so on, and he usually deals with only the simpler phases of emotion. His subjects engage attention in regard to the development of the story; and it would be an interruption hardly desirable to have to pause over minutiæ of manipulation when we want to follow out the large effects of the artist. The adornments that we want and get take the form of vivid and exquisite pictures, resulting from force of imagination and readiness of expression, and so clear and well-defined as to need no study on the reader's part to take them in. The interest is always sufficiently sustained by wealth of imagination, unfaltering straightforwardness of action, entire absence of anything like commonplace, and an adequate degree of force, sweetness, and propriety of

expression. Above all, the work is always distinctly poetry-not prose draped in a transparent veil of pseudo-poetry: to whatever length his works may run we do not miss in them that condensation without which verse can never be poetry."

Again, with regard to Morris's peculiar position and faculty, we fully agree with the following: "In the ordinary books of reference, mythology and folk-lore, especially Greek myth and romance, are reduced to their lowest possible terms, and deprived of all aroma; but in Mr. Morris's books we have the added aroma of true poetic method and imagination, to supply what is so delicately fugitive in the ordinary process of distillation, as well as a rare discriminative tact to eliminate such of the grosser elements of the subject as are inessential, though retained in the exaggerated prose nakedness of the books of reference. These poems are such as no man need scruple to take home to his wife and leave within reach of his children; for if unimpregnated with modern doctrine, they are at least innocent of what is gross in ancient creeds. Of philosophy there is just enough to afford the poet a point of view from which to treat his subjects. Without a moderately palpable point of view it is impossible to show great unity of intention; but Mr. Morris's point of view, though sufficient for this purpose, is as unmodern as his subjects and method. In fact, whatever philosophy is expressed or implied gives rise to no inconvenience in treating his chosen subjects: from the hardy minds of the old world he has adopted all that is kindly, humane, resignedly brave, and a little of what is sad in the pathetic belief in a short life soon to be forgotten; but the evident healthiness of a robust manly soul has saved him from deforming his works by any fatal admixture of that maudlin antitheism which cannot but mar the calm beauty of an antique ideal. There is no trace here of unhealthy revolt against circumstance and law; and although we may learn lessons to struggle after attainable good and away from avoidable evil, we are made to feel at the same time the beauty and strength of manly submission to the inevitable, so that if one calls the poet 'pagan,' it is but in the negative sense of exhibiting no essential and distinctive modern principle, esthetic, ethic, or religious."

There must be a great buoyancy of power in Morris to enable him to raise the details which a story-teller is bound to furnish, into poetry without injury to simple directness of narrative. Here is an instance of his peculiar power in this direction :

Yea, I heard withal,
In the fresh morning air, the trowel's fall
Upon the stone, a thin noise far away.

How many are there with senses so exquisitely cultivated that in the description of common things they can hit upon just the right tone that

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