th this ring keep memory with the morn,
O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn
Remember me, who am of Odin's blood.'"

All this encounter is a passage of high invention. The adventures in
Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out to find
Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was not
remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. The tale of the wanderers was
Mr. Morris's own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race,
fairy tales coming to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the
Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland. The whole performance is
astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks
of Parnassus are to be climbed. Once more literature has a narrator, on
the whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir
Walter. Humour and action are not so prominent as contemplation of a
pageant reflected in a fairy mirror. But Mr. Morris has said himself,
about his poem, what I am trying to say:--

"Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;
Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
Though still the less we knew of its intent;
The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
Hung round about a little room, where play
Weeping and laughter of man's empty day."

Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength of his sympathy with
the heroic sagas of Iceland. He had rendered one into verse, in "The
Earthly Paradise," above all, "Grettir the Strong" and "The Volsunga" he
had done into English prose. His next great poem was "The Story of
Sigurd," a poetic rendering of the theme which is, to the North, what the
Tale of Troy is to Greece, and to all the world. Mr. Morris took the
form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most birthmarks of its
savage origin--the version of the "Volsunga," not the German shape of the
"Nibelungenlied." He showed extraordinary skill, especially in making
human and intelligible the story of Regin, Otter, Fafnir, and the Dwarf
Andvari's Hoard.

"It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen old,
And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall,
And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call,
And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might be
wrought.
Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul