we leave Jason and The Earthly Paradise, a word must
be said about their medievalisms, delicate inconsistencies, which,
coming in a poem of Greek subject, bring into this white dawn
thoughts of the delirious night just over and make one's sense of
relief deeper. The opening of the fourth book of Jason describes the
embarkation of the Argonauts: as in a dream, the scene shifts and we
go down from Iolchos to the sea through a pageant of the Middle Age
in some French or Italian town. The gilded vanes on the spires, the
bells ringing in the towers, the trellis of roses at the window, the
close planted with apple-trees, the grotesque undercroft with its
close-set pillars, change by a single touch the air of these Greek
cities and we are at Glastonbury by the tomb of Arthur. The nymph in
furred raiment who seduces Hylas is conceived frankly in the spirit
of Teutonic romance; her song is of a garden [226] enclosed, such as
that with which the old church glass-stainer surrounds the mystic
bride of the song of songs. Medea herself has a hundred touches of
the medieval sorceress, the sorceress of the Streckelberg or the
Blocksberg: her mystic changes are Christabel's. It is precisely
this effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved against the sorrow of
the Middle Age, which forms the chief motives of The Earthly
Paradise: with an exquisite dexterity the two threads of sentiment
are here interwoven and contrasted. A band of adventurers sets out
from Norway, most northerly of northern lands, where the plague is
raging--the bell continually ringing as they carry the Sacrament to
the sick. Even in Mr. Morris's earliest poems snatches of the sweet
French tongue had always come with something of Hellenic blitheness
and grace. And now it is below the very coast of France, through the
fleet of Edward the Third, among the gaily painted medieval sails,
that we pass to a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divine
good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age.
There the stories of The Earthly Paradise are told, Greek story and
romantic alternating; and for the crew of the Rose Garland, coming
across the sins of the earlier world with the sign of the cross, and
drinking Rhine-wine in Greece, the two worlds of sentiment are
confronted.

[227] One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry
has, which is on its surface--the continual suggestion, pensive or
passionate, of the shortness of life. This i