s. They are "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and
"The Lovers of Gudrun," in Vol. II, and "The Fostering of Aslaug," in
Vol. III. Of these "The Lovers of Gudrun" forms a class by itself; it is
a poem to be reckoned with when the dozen greatest poems of the century
are listed. The late Laureate may have equalled it in the best of the
_Idylls of the King_, but he never excelled it. Let us look at it in
detail.

First, be it said that "The Lovers of Gudrun" overtops all the other
poems in _The Earthly Paradise_. It would be possible to prove that
Morris was at his best when he worked with Old Norse material, but that
task shall not detain us now. It is enough to note that the "Prologue"
to _The Earthly Paradise_, called "The Wanderers," makes the leader of
these wanderers, who turn story-tellers when they reach the city by "the
borders of the Grecian sea," a Norseman. Born in Byzantium of a Greek
mother, he claimed Norway as his home, and on his father's death
returned to his kin. His speech to the Elder of the City reveals a
touching loyalty to his father's home and traditions:

But when I reached one dying autumn-tide
My uncle's dwelling near the forest-side,
And saw the land so scanty and so bare,
And all the hard things men contend with there,
A little and unworthy land it seemed,
And yet the more of Asagard I dreamed,
And worthier seemed the ancient faith of praise.

Here is the man, William Morris, in perfect miniature. Modern life and
training had given him a speech and aspect quite suave and cultured, but
the blood that flowed in his veins was red, and the tincture of iron was
in it. In religion, in art, in poetry, in economics, he loved the past
better than the present, though he was never unconscious of "our
glorious gains." In all departments of thought the scanty, the bare, the
hard, the unworthy, drew first his attention and then his love and
enthusiastic praise. And so perhaps it is explained that of all the
poems in _The Earthly Paradise_, the one indited first in the scarred
and dreadful land where neither wheat nor wine is at home, shall be the
finest in this latter-day retelling.

The first seventy years of the thirteenth century were the blossoming
time of the historic saga in Iceland, and those writings that record the
doings of the families of the land form, with the old songs and the best
of the kingly sagas, the flower of Northern literature. These fami