reprinted, and would be difficult to meet with, as the magazine is now

WINTER WEATHER.

There are, as is natural, faults in this early production; as, for instance, it is not easy to see from an artistic point of view why the hound which has once become still begins again to bay at the close of the poem. But in spite of the faults, which are principally those due to the want of that careful finish which practice alone can give, there are unmistakable signs of a power of picturesque and dramatic narration.

When Street left Oxford and had been some three months established

in London, William Morris parted from him and began to study painting. He was at the indeterminate, conceited age, and had to work his way out of the Puseyite paths. He was idle and did no very notable work in painting, but developed a turn for the decorative arts, and was gradually drifting towards occupation.

Burne Jones had been a chum of his at Oxford. Dante Rossetti's friendship he had made in London through the mediumship of Wilfrid Healey, a Trinity (Cambridge) man, one of the first of the Competition Wallahs, and an acquaintance of Mr. Vernon Lushington. Mr. Rossetti, who was about five years Mr. Morris's senior, was particularly friendly and kind; and a little circle of what we might almost term ideal realists (for the ideal has its reality) was formed in London. In poetry not only was Rossetti's influence upon William Morris, but also that of both Brownings. Robert Browning with his wondrous dramatic vitality was a wholesome influence; and Mrs. Browning, attracting strongly by such poems as her "Rhyme of Duchess May," was a happy choice for a young poet's worship. Not until years afterwards did William Morris meet either of the Brownings, to be able to acknowledge personally his debt of gratitude to them.

"The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems," which was published in 1859, is a fine addition to the gallery of Arthurian romance and Froissartian memories. Southey's "Morte D'Arthur" may be held partly responsible for awakening this special interest.

In such a volume there was great danger of utter failure. A mediæval revival in poetry would have met with scorn if it had shown either weakness or affectation. The realism, if occasionally violent, is so thorough, and the passion that pervades the whole so intense, that no gap is felt between the old time and the new, so different though they be. The moving realities, the burning colours of life, make us feel at home even among knights and ladies such as we can now nowhere find in the flesh. A sentimental femininity was the danger to fear in such a poetic attempt; a masculine strength, even rude at times, is the actual quality that is found. The figures might have worn garments such as one sees in tapestry, and swords and helmets very blue, and have yet been lifeless puppets, walking draperies; as they are, they are living men and women, though not of our day. We are introduced to the hushed chambers of our ancestors, where gradually rise voices, and forms shape themselves from out the mist, strong and beautiful, and faded colours glow once more, and though we are moving in a dream, we feel the beating of pulses and the burning of hearts. The story-teller's faculty was vividly and dramatically manifest; "The Haystack in the Floods," for instance, may be cited as evidence of directness and force of style.

William Morris found his first waft upon the seas of fame, not in the arts of publishers, but in the spontaneous recognition of appreciative

readers. The Literary Gazette, at the period of the publication of "The Defence of Guenevere," was endeavouring to undo the evil of Jerdan's corruptibility, and its reviews were genuine expressions of critical feeling. Mr. Richard Garnett, of the British Museum, a well-known writer and critic, and among the contributors to the present University Magazine, may be regarded as the first public appreciator of William Morris's verse. Mr. Holmes, now the Queen's Librarian at Windsor Castle, had brought before Mr. Garnett's notice certain poems and prose romances in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which at that time had been dead for a little over a year, and, a poet himself, he had recognised the divinity astir in them. So that when a volume appeared containing, with other longer poems, these anonymous poetic acquaintances, Mr. Garnett was prepared to do justice to it, and reviewed it at length, in the first week of March 1858. A great point in this review was the allusion to the poetic anastasis of the Arthurian cycle of romance, with special reference to the fact that Mr. Morris was without trace of Tennysonian influence, and indeed approached mediæval things in a totally different way. Thus early was Morris compared with Tennyson, the latter being described as writing of the Arthurian period like a modern, the former like a contemporary. "The Laureate," said Mr. Garnett, "is as superior in brilliance of phrase, finish of style, and magic of versification, as he is inferior in dramatic propriety and couleur locale." Mr. Garnett was bold enough to speak of the new writer as "of real original genius," as "a poet whom poets love;" and when we think that it was of an unknown writer, then only twenty-four years of age, that he spoke, we must allow that Mr. Garnett's criticisms proceed from a true instinct and possess a prophetic quality.

But recognition was slow. It was not until 1860, for instance, that Fraser reviewed the volume, claiming for it the ring of true metal, but alleging that it had passed unrecognised by the critics. It may be interesting to quote what was said of our author before he had become famous :— "Mr. Morris is the poet of pre-Raphaelitism. To my friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter,' he dedicates his book; and it is not fanciful to say that there is a striking family likeness between the works of the poet and those of the painter. Both artists draw their inspiration from the fount of the Morte d'Arthur. They are thoroughly familiar with the figures of England's chivalry, and with the forms of its heroic life. Instead of Palmerston and Napoleon, Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad are the names in all men's mouths. Guenevere is the standard to which the beauty of all other women is unconsciously referred. We hear of 'bastides' and 'villaynes,' of the 'camaille' and the 'ceinture,' and the 'basnet,' and the 'salade,' more than enough perhaps; but at the same time we see that these are not the mere stage properties in a fantastic mumming, an Eglintoun tournament; that the employment

of antique words and habits is not formal or antiquarian only, but denotes a living insight into the thought and heart of the dead people whose life they shaped. Then they are both colourists of a high order.. Mr. Rossetti excels all his contemporaries, is excelled by no one perhaps since Titian, in the oriental richness, the vivid splendour, the intense glow which he can bring out of colours that, in the hands of other men, remain dingy and ineffective, and produce no vivid impression. It is always, in like manner, the colour of an object which first attracts Mr. Morris's eye. He falls in love with the golden hair of his heroines before he marks whether they are tall or short, ugly or beautiful. The green and gold and purple and scarlet which Mr. Rossetti uses reproduced in his poems."

are

In his dramatic realism William Morris was not always introducing us to the knightly heroes of the past; there were poems in which he was transmuting feeling into colour in a way that might appeal to the most modern amongst us.

The following is a fair instance of early power in the production of what in a landscape painting might be called feeling. We quote from the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, following only two small typographical corrections made when the poem was reprinted, and making another small alteration that is almost imperceptible :

SUMMER DAWN.

Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.

The summer night waneth, the morning light slips

Faint and grey 'twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud bars
That are patiently waiting there for the morn—
Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the morn,
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.

Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn.

This first poetic achievement was, as might be expected, a succès d'estime rather than a commercial one. About William Morris's later works a very different story could be told; and yet he is known to have said that a man should not expect to be paid for work which has already given him his return in the pleasure of the doing of it, and that the labour which deserves remuneration is when we face the annoyances of the less ideal business of life.

"The Defence of Guenevere" has been since reprinted, rather than republished, without any revision from the author, which might have been a considerable labour, owing to the differences that arise, not so much from any necessity for correction as from the change of view con

sequent upon the development of maturity of thought and style. It was understood that the book was not to be advertised, as the author did not care to make himself again responsible for it; but, as there was nothing positively boyish in it, he did not like to say "No" to the request for its republication.

At the end of 1857 were in progress a series of paintings in distemper, treating subjects from the cycle of Arthurean romance, upon the walls of the Oxford Union Debating Room. The painters were J. H. Pollen, E. Burne Jones, V. Prinsep, D. G. Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and William Morris, the subject taken up by Mr. Morris being Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir Tristram and the Fair Isulte. Sad to say, the exquisite decorative effect of these frescoes is becoming sadly marred, and that before its time, presumably through the use of treacherous materials. But the matter of wall paintings has been a disappointing one so often that no ruin of this kind surprises any longer, and we wonder rather that Mr. Leighton's work in the New Forest should show no visible mark of decay. More recently a ceiling was painted by Morris in the same debating room, and this, we will hope, will endure.

In 1858 or 1859 Morris married Miss Burden, a lady whose name might happily be absorbed by a writer of ballads. The family consists of two daughters, who show a practical sympathy with their father's tastes.

The pre-Raphaelite group, of which Morris had become a member, was endowed, among its well-known features, with a conviction as to the honour of labour and the glory of thoroughness. This characteristic, combining with that consciousness and love of splendour which underlies any form of art, led to a practical result. Several friends-Madox Brown, Burne Jones, Rossetti, Webb, and Morris, entered into partnership and started a business, which was to embody their artistic principles. It was so ideal a little guild that one marvels it did not fade away in a year or two like a Brook Farm community or a scheme of Pantisocracy. But work and will, patience and perseverance, so long as they are downright, and not merely sentimental, are as efficacious in producing solid results when wielded by young Oxonians and exquisite-handed painters, as when they are manifested by a group of navvies. The business began on the old-fashioned principle of being small at first, and developing according to the strength it gained. It was founded on the slenderest means, and began on the smallest scale; its capital consisting in part of the remains of Morris's little patrimony, but mostly of brains and hands. Growing out, as he was now, of that fault which of all is most easily mended-excessive youth, Morris threw off the velvet mantle of the dilettante, and took the business department upon his own shoulders. At one period he was helped in this by an old Oxford chum named Faulkner. The production of painted windows was