e
by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these
persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and
their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the
characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere" are people of
flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the
trappings of their tabards.

There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris's old Oxford
days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him, with all its
contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest desire to enjoy this
life to the full in war and love, or to make certain of a future in which
war is not, and all love is pure heavenly. If one were to choose
favourites from "The Defence of Guinevere," they would be the ballads of
"Shameful Death," and of "The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind,"
which has the wind's wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of
"Porphyria's Lover" in its burden.

The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and
happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the scarlet
roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make the poem a
vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayer of
his lady, in "The Wind":

"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind
It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind;
On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;
If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,
And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar,
And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war."

"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some drawings
of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Our
brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, when Mr. Morris,
Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. Perhaps it wants
a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, though "The
Haystack in the Floods," with its tragedy, must surely appeal to all who
read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris's
long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were less art than
"art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment.
"The Earthly Paradise," and still more certainly "Jason," are full of
such pleasure as only poet