perfect sympathy for Admetus, with so perfect a
sympathy that he cannot persuade himself that one so happy died at all;
and he, unlike all other poets, has delighted to tell us that the men
after his own heart, the men of his _News from Nowhere_, sorrowed but a
little while over unhappy love. He cannot even think of nobility and
happiness apart, for all his people are like his men of Burg Dale who
lived 'in much plenty and ease of life, though not delicately or desiring
things out of measure. They wrought with their hands and wearied
themselves; and they rested from their toil and feasted and were merry;
to-morrow was not a burden to them, nor yesterday a thing which they
would fain forget; life shamed them not nor did death make them afraid. As
for the Dale wherein they dwelt, it was indeed most fair and lovely and
they deemed it the Blessing of the earth, and they trod the flowery grass
beside its rippled stream amidst the green tree-boughs proudly and
joyfully with goodly bodies and merry hearts.'

III

I think of his men as with broad brows and golden beards and mild eyes and
tranquil speech, and of his good women as like 'The Bride' in whose face
Rossetti saw and painted for once the abundance of earth and not the
half-hidden light of his star. They are not in love with love for its own
sake, with a love that is apart from the world or at enmity with it, as
Swinburne imagines Mary Stuart and as all men have imagined Helen. They
do not seek in love that ecstasy, which Shelley's nightingale called
death, that extremity of life in which life seems to pass away like the
Phoenix in flame of its own lighting, but rather a gentle self-surrender
that would lose more than half its sweetness if it lost the savour of
coming days. They are good house-wives; they sit often at the embroidery
frame, and they have wisdom in flocks and herds and they are before all
fruitful mothers. It seems at times as if their love was less a passion
for one man out of the world than submission to the hazard of destiny, and
the hope of motherhood and the innocent desire of the body. They accept
changes and chances of life as gladly as they accept spring and summer and
autumn and winter, and because they have sat under the shadow of the Green
Tree and drunk the Waters of Abundance out of their hollow hands, the
barren blossoms do not seem to them the most beautiful. When Habundia
takes the shape of Birdalone she comes first as a young naked girl