KELMSCOTT HOUSE 



the world to paint pictures, and of the other half to buy them ! 

 Rossetti admired Morris's poetry, but urged him to become a painter 

 on the plea that " if any man has any poetry in him, he should 

 paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely 

 begun to paint it." For two years or more, therefore, Morris 

 worked hard at drawing and painting, but he never became a 

 painter. Had he done so, his claim to be in the first rank whether 

 pre-Raphaelite or not would have been inevitably challenged, 

 whereas as a decorative artist he was unique : there is but one 

 William Morris ! 



Owing to Rossetti's influence, and his own natural bent that way, 

 there is much of Romanticism in his earlier poetry. His ultimate 

 preference for the heroic and epic form of verse, first showed itself 

 when, about 1869, the Rossetti influence waning, his Icelandic 

 studies seriously began. In 1870, in company with Mr. Magniissen, 

 the Icelandic scholar under whose guidance he had been studying 

 the Icelandic heroic literature, he went to Iceland, calling, en route, 

 at the lonely Faroe Islands. 



" God made the world, but the Devil made Iceland," says a 

 Danish proverb ; and in Iceland, " burst up, the geologists say, by 

 fire from the bottom of the sea, swallowed many months of the 

 year in black tempests, yet with a wild, glittering beauty in summer- 

 time ; towering up there ; stern and grim in the North Ocean 

 with its snow Jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur pools and horrid 

 volcanic caverns ; like the waste chaotic battlefields of frost and 

 fire ; where of all places we least looked for literature and written 

 memorials the records of these things were written down." 



The literary remains of which Carlyle here speaks, were the Eddas, 

 or religious poems of Scandinavia, together with the Sagas, that 

 dealt with the wanderings, deeds, and adventures of the Vikings ; 

 all of which were fortunately preserved for posterity in Iceland, by 

 the Norwegians who colonized it A.D. 872. At that period Harold 

 Fairhair uniting all Norway under his sway, some of the mal- 

 contents among his new subjects, among them many of the best 

 and bravest of the race, fled to Iceland for independence and 

 shelter, carrying with them the religion of Odin. 



It flourished there until the introduction of Christianity, about 

 the eleventh century. And even then the Icelanders seem to 

 have been but half-hearted converts to the new faith, for not only 



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