he rode across grim solitary wastes with more
enthusiasm than he could give to the wonted pilgrimages to Florence and
Venice. When he was once under the spell, only the geysers with their
suggestion of modern text-books and _Mangnall's Questions_[51] could
bore him; all else was magical and entrancing. This enthusiasm bore
fruit in _Sigurd the Volsung_, the most powerful of his epic poems,
written in an old English metre, which Morris, with true feeling for
craftsmanship, revived and adapted to his theme. His poetry in general,
less rich than that of Tennyson, less intense than that of Rossetti,
had certain qualities of its own, and owed its popularity chiefly to his
gift for telling a story swiftly, naturally and easily, and in such a
way as to carry his reader along with him.

[Note 51: Letter quoted in _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol.
i, p. 257 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1911).]

His fame was growing in London, which was ready enough in the nineteenth
century to make the most of its poets. In Society, if he had allowed it
to entertain him, he would have been a picturesque figure, though hardly
such as was expected by admirers of his poetry and his art. To some his
dress suggested only the prosperous British workman; to one who knew him
later he seemed like 'the purser of a Dutch brig' in his blue tweed
sailor-cut suit. This was his Socialist colleague Mr. Hyndman, who
describes 'his imposing forehead and clear grey eyes with the powerful
nose and slightly florid cheeks', and tells us how, when he was talking,
'every hair of his head and his rough shaggy beard appeared to enter
into the subject as a living part of himself.' Elsewhere he speaks of
Morris's 'quick, sharp manner, his impulsive gestures, his hearty
laughter and vehement anger'. At times Morris could be bluff beyond
measure. Stopford Brooke, who afterwards became one of his friends,
recounts his first meeting with Morris in 1867. 'He didn't care for
parsons, and he glared at me when I said something about good manners.
Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he
shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was
to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he
was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask into mixed company.

But it was less in literature than in art that he influenced his
generation, and we must return to the history of the firm. From small
beginnings it had estab