KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
along with it men and women, struggling still, though battered and 
well-nigh spent; a torrent that, in its wild onward rush to the 
misty ocean of futurity, may sometimes, it is true, wash them into 
‘a safe and gentle backwater—but oftener dashes them against the 
rocks to an untoward fate. His conception of life, as shown in 
“The Earthly Paradise” at all events, is rather that of a placid 
stream, flowing smoothly between flowery banks, and watering 
some lotus-eating land in which it seems always afternoon. 
Chaucer—to whom physically as well as mentally he was said to 
bear a resemblance—was professedly Morris’s model—for the age 
of Chaucer was to him the Golden Age—but though after Chaucer 
he is the greatest of story-tcllers, his poetic genius has more affinity 
with that of Keats, whom he called “ one of his masters,”? and 
admired more than any modern poet. He is always musical and 
often dreamy ; the lovely lines that end “‘ The Earthly Paradise ” 
—adopted for the front cover of this book, because they so exactly 
explain its purpose, are typical of Morris at his best, though he has 
written many others of which the sentiment is as true, and the 
language as choice. Nevertheless, his sweetest stanzas have not 
the haunting melody, the rich suggestiveness, to be found in such 
lines of Keats as those beginning : 
“ Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird !”’ 
Nor so far as I know, from a reading that has been necessarily 
limited, is there anything in the whole range of Morris’s poetry 
which has the splendid imagery, the languorous beauty of diction, 
and at the same time the fervour, the depth, and the suppressed 
passion, of that dream within a dream, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 
when : 
ce 
See ages long ago 
These lovers fled away into the storm.” 
It is much to Morris’s credit that his meaning is always clear ; 
and that if in his verse there are no passages that, owing to their 
incisiveness, wisdom, and originality, have passed into proverbs, 
becoming ‘‘ familiar in our mouths as household words ”—neither, 
on the other hand, are there any worrying obscurities, such as we 
encounter in Browning. He makes, it is-true, no heavy demands 
on the intellect, or the emotions, and though I cannot see that it is 
necessarily the province of poetry to do the former—it should 
275 18* 
