scures in a flood of gorgeous rhetoric a situation which ought to concentrate itself in a sentence. His surpassing gift of melody enchants us; but when it ends. we are like men who have heard a Wagnerian opera, and find it difficult to recall a single air. No one is so difficult to quote, because his poetry contains so few lines which are distinguished by their concentration of phrase. He never seems to have used the pruning-knife; he flings down his opulent verses in all their original unrestrained luxuriance, and not infrequently mistakes abundance for opulence. He surfeits us, but does not satisfy us. A prolonged course of Swinburne leaves us bewildered with a sense of riches, but in reality none the richer. His poetry is like fairy-gold: we dream that we are wealthy, but our wealth perpetually eludes us. For that which makes poetry a real possession is not only the art of expression, but the gift of thought, and Mr. Swinburne never was, and never will be, a thinker. We always feel that he has no message, that his very vehemence is a sign of weakness, and that his seeming power of words conceals an actual feebleness of thought. There are, of course, pocts who live by their exquisite power of expression alone, and who have contributed. little to the intellectual impulses of the world. Keats was such a poet, but Keats had in a supreme degree that gift of concentrated phrase which Mr. Swinburne lacks. So that when we carefully consider Mr. Swinburne's claims to permanent remembrance, they are all narrowed down into the fact that he is a great metrical artist, and he must stand or fall upon that one indisputable quality. Perhaps it seems little to say; yet when we consider how difficult it is to introduce into a literature of poetry so enormous as the English

any new form of expression, any metrical originality, it is not so little as it appears. That, at all events, is Mr. Swinburne's solitary claim; and it is in virtue of that we must rank him among those who have helped to mould and develop modern English letters.

CHAPTER XXXV.

WILLIAM MORRIS

[Born at Walthamstow, Essex, 1834. The "Defence of Guinevere" published 1858. Joined the Socialistic League 1884.]

W

ILLIAM MORRIS is the third great name connected with the revival of Romanticism in modern poetry. His "Defence of Guinevere," published in 1858, and dedicated to Rossetti, is marked by that same return to the mediaval spirit which so strikingly distinguished Rossetti, and which bore partial fruit in the early poems of Swinburne. The chief thing to be noticed about all three poets is that their poetry disdains modern thought and purpose, and deliberately seeks its inspiration in other times, and more ancient sources of emotion. Rossetti alone remained absolutely true to the medieval spirit: his last poems had as distinctly as his first the impress and mould of mediaval Romanticism. Swinburne, as we have seen, did his best work under the shadows of Greek Classicism, and has besides grown more modern in spirit as he has grown older, handling purely modern themes, as in his "Songs before Sunrise," with all his early vehemence and metrical skill. With William Morris the fascination of present-day life is a thing of very recent growth, and it can scarcely be said that it has done anything to help his poetry. As a poet he has three distinct

periods. First comes the period when, in common with Rossetti, the fascination of ballad-romance was strong upon him, and its fruit is the thirty poems contained in his earliest volume. When he next appealed to the public he had cast off the glamour of mediævalism, and had become an epic poet. This is the period of "Jason" and the "Earthly Paradise." The last period, if such it may be called, is marked by an awakening to the actual conditions of modern life, and is signalised by a series of "Chants for Socialists," which are remarkable rather for political passion than poetic power. It may be well for us briefly to glance at these three periods.

William Morris's first volume, the "Defence of Guinevere," is a remarkable book. It is not only significant for its revival of medieval feeling, but also for its artistic feeling, its sense of colour, its touches of frank yet inoffensive sensuousness, its simplicity and directness of poetic effect. As a matter of fact, the question whether Morris should devote his life to art or literature for a long time hung in the balance, and it is only natural that his poetry should be remarkable for richness of colour and objective effect. The "Defence of Guinevere" is a fragment, but its very abruptness and incompleteness are effective. Its involution of thought, its curious touches of indirect introspection, its vivid glow of colour, its half-grotesque yet powerful imagery, are essentially medieval. Such lines as the following at once recall the very method of Rossetti, and bear in themselves the marks of their relationship to the "Blessed Damozel:"

Listen: suppose your time were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak:
Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily

The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak

Of river through your broad lands running well:
Suppose a hush should come, then someone speak:

"One of those cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

Of your own strength and mightiness: here, see!"
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see

A great God's angel standing, with such dyes
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

Showing him well, and making his commands
Seem to be God's commands; moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands:

And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue
Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;

No man could tell the better of the two.

After a shivering half-hour you said

"God help! heaven's colour, the blue;" and he said, "Hell."

Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

And cry to all good men who loved you well,
"Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known."

It is characteristic of mediæval imagination to dwell in the borderland of spiritual mystery, and to utter itself with perfect unrestraint, much as a child speaks of such things, with a fearlessness which is unconscious of wrong, and a quaintness which gives a touch of sublimity to what in other lips would sound simply grotesque. It is precisely this frank and fascinating quaintness which William Morris has admirably reproduced in this remarkable poem. His description of the angel is the