poles asunder from its author's sympathies. The translations from the Icelandic, which we have already mentioned, are remarkable for their closeness in point of form to their originals, and the same may be said for the three little French romances; but in the case of the latter the Old French lends itself more gracefully to our tongue, of which it is, in truth, a sort of foster-mother.

His published prose romances begin with The House of the Wolfings, a form of literary art so new that new canons of criticism have to be formulated and applied to it.' It is the tale of a little Northern tribe attacked by the Romans, and is told in prose intermingled with song-speech-a true

WILLIAM MORRIS. From a Photograph by Messrs Walker & Boutall.

Northern saga. From that time forward a succession of these tales poured from his pen, The Roots of the Mountains, The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Wood beyond the World, The Well at the World's End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and The Sundering Flood. Round their language and diction a storm of criticism raged. A public accustomed to the stereotyped form of the magazine and the newspaper found itself in face of a use of language as individual and as striking as that of Carlyle or Meredith, and wondered accordingly. For Morris the use of archaic words and old-world turn of phrase was an artistic necessity, if he were to create the atmosphere he required, to awaken the mind to the expectation of strange surroundings and simpler if unaccustomed motives. He is not in the world of Caxton or of Malory, yet of such surroundings is his tale built up, and his language recalls, but does not copy, theirs. For this age of his romance never existed a fact which no man knew better than himself. Two pasts were always with him: the historical, with

its riches of art and its squalid poverty, its high aims and marvellous performances, its misery and vice, its good and bad, and the bad very bad; the other an ideal age, five hundred years behind us and a thousand years ahead. The age in which he loved to move is one which contains only what is fairest and strongest in mediæval life: he peoples with his imagination a little hollow land, sheltered by wide forests and desolate wastes, where his loved ones may live undisturbed, far from the foes of the outside world. Once, indeed, he began a story of the actual past-the adventures of one of his favourite Northmen in the decaying Roman civilisation, but he found the task of portraying its evil too great for what was to be the solace of his leisure hours, and he abandoned it half-done. To the picturing, then, of this ideal world the poet, the artist in words, brought a style wholly new, which places these romances among the most original contributions to pure literature that our epoch has seen. Morris's use of the supernatural, too, is very personal and quite northern in character, avoiding the bizarre, the cruel, the borderland of madness into which so many of the German Romantic school fall. Perhaps the principal defect of these romances is a want of relief to the virtues of almost all the actors therein: even the criminality which occurs is business-like and free from any taint of

meanness.

The literary art of William Morris is, as we have said, of the Romantic school; indeed, in many respects it is not too much to say that the school touches its high-water mark of achievement with him. Perhaps no single line of his reaches the haunting beauty of certain stanzas from Keats or the sensuous magic of Rossetti; but, on the other hand, he is free from the mysticism of the latter, he has a fuller and stronger sweep of wing than the former. Analogies have been sought for him with Chaucer and with Spenser, but though he is a romantic story-teller like Chaucer, he is distinguished from him by the fact that he finishes his stories, and by his deliberate avoidance of humour in his writing, probably in accordance with the theories of art he held. That this avoidance was deliberate is known from the suppressed conclusion of Sir Peter Harpedon's End, of which Mr Watts-Dunton has preserved the memory. His points of contact with Spenser are more numerous, but no exact parallel can be drawn. His art as a story-teller was that of the improvisatore, and he carried it to the highest point of which it was capable. The pictorial quality of his work sets him in a class apart from other writers of the Romantic school. His special bent of mind was historic, and there were few questions concerning the Middle Ages which he had not studied. Scott knew history perhaps as well; he had at his finger-ends all that was to be known of olden times, but he did not see as Morris did. He could describe, he could not paint in words. My work,' said Morris, 'is the embodi

ment of dreams-to bring before men's eyes the image of the thing my heart is filled with.' It was this characteristic—the pictorial view of things —which, in addition to the romantic spirit and the imaginative love of beauty, gave unity and harmony to all his work, artistic and literary.

The Wedding Path.

He said: 'We shall be home but a very little while after the first, for the way I tell of is as short as the Portway. But hearken, my sweet! When we are in the meadows we shall sit down for a minute on a bank under the chestnut trees, and thence watch the moon coming up over the southern cliffs. And I shall behold

thee in the summer night, and deem that I see all thy beauty; which yet shall make me dumb with wonder when I see it indeed in the house amongst the candles.'

'O nay,' she said, by the Portway shall we go; the torch-bearers shall be abiding thee at the gate.'

Spake Face-of-god: 'Then shall we rise up and wend first through a wide treeless meadow, wherein amidst the night we shall behold the kine moving about like odorous shadows; and through the greyness of the moonlight thou shalt deem that thou seest the pink colour of the eglantine blossoms, so fragrant they are.'

'O nay,' she said, but it is meet that we go by the Portway.'

But he said: Then from the wide meadow come we into a close of corn, and then into an orchard-close beyond it. There in the ancient walnut-tree the owl sitteth breathing hard in the night-time; but thou shalt not hear him for the joy of the nightingales singing from the apple-trees of the close. Then from out of the shadowed orchard shall we come into the open townmeadow, and over its daisies shall the moonlight be lying in a grey flood of brightness.

'Short is the way across it to the brim of the Weltering Water, and across the water lieth the fair garden of the Face; and I have dight for thee there a little boat to waft us across the night-dark waters, that shall be like wavering flames of white fire where the moon smites them, and like the void of all things where the shadows hang over them. There then shall we be in the garden, beholding how the hall-windows are yellow, and hearkening the sound of the hall-glee borne across the flowers and blending with the voice of the nightingales in the There then shall we go along the grass paths whereby the pinks and the cloves and the lavender are sending forth their fragrance, to cheer us, who faint at the scent of the over-worn roses, and the honey-sweetness of the lilies.

trees.

'All this is for thee, and for nought but for thee this even; and many a blossom whereof thou knowest nought shall grieve if thy foot tread not thereby to-night; if the path of thy wedding which I have made, be void of thee, on the even of the Chamber of Love.

'But lo! at last at the garden's end is the yew-walk arched over for thee, and thou canst not see whereby to enter it; but I, I know it, and I lead thee into and along the dark tunnel through the moonlight, and thine hand is not weary of mine as we go. But at the end shall we come to a wicket, which shall bring us out by the gableend of the Hall of the Face. Turn we about its corner then, and there are we blinking on the torches of the torch-bearers, and the candles through the open door, and the hall ablaze with light and full of joyous clamour,

like the bale-fire in the dark night kindled on a ness above the sea by fisher-folk remembering the Gods.' 'O nay,' she said, 'but by the Portway must we go; the straightest way to the Gate of Burgstead.'

In vain she spake, and knew not what she said; for even as he was speaking he led her away, and her feet went as her will went, rather than her words; and even as she said that last word she set her foot on the first board of the foot-bridge; and she turned aback one moment, and saw the long line of the rock-wall yet glowing with the last of the sunset of midsummer, while as she turned again, lo! before her the moon just beginning to lift himself above the edge of the southern cliffs, and betwixt her and him all Burgdale, and Face-of-god (From The Roots of the Mountains.)

moreover.

Summer Dawn.

Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
The summer night waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and grey 'twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt

the cloud-bars,

That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:

Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,

The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn.

(From The Defence of Guenevere.)

I know a little garden close.
'I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.

'And though within it no birds sing,
And though no pillared house is there,
And though the apple boughs are bare
Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
Her feet upon the green grass trod,
And I beheld them as before.

'There comes a murmur from the shore,
And in the place two fair streams are,
Drawn from the purple hills afar,
Drawn down unto the restless sea;
The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
The shore no ship has ever seen,
Still beaten by the billows green,
Whose murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.

For which I cry both day and night,
For which I let slip all delight,
That maketh me both deaf and blind,
Careless to win, unskilled to find,
And quick to lose what all men seek.
'Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place,
To seek the unforgotten face

Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me Anigh the murmuring of the sea.'

(From The Life and Death of Jason, Book iv.)

[The Life of William Morris, by Mr J. W. Mackail, was published in two volumes in 1899; a book on Morris, his art, his writings, and his public life, by Mr Aymer Vallance, had appeared in 1897, in which year Mr Buxton Forman produced The Books of William Morris; and there is A Description of the Kelmscott Press by Mr S. C. Cockerell (1898).]

ROBERT STEELE.

Thomas Hood the Younger (1835-74), son of a more famous father, Thomas Hood the Elder (see above at page 136), studied at Pembroke College, Oxford; published a poem, a 'Farewell to the Swallows,' in 1853, and a series of Pen and Pencil Pictures in 1857; and after a year or two of journalism in Cornwall and five years' clerking in the War Office, he became, in 1865, editor of Fun, to which he contributed largely in prose, in verse, and in drawings. He published half-adozen novels, the best Captain Masters's Children (1865); and to a volume of his Favourite Poems (Boston, U.S., 1877) his sister prefixed a Memoir.

Richard Garnett, born at Lichfield in 1835, the son of a keeper of books in the British Museum, held in the same institution a succession of posts, being latterly editor (1881-90) of the great catalogue and (1890-99) keeper of printed books. He has published several volumes of original verse, besides translations from German and Italian, essays, and books on Carlyle, Emerson, Milton, Blake, and E. G. Wakefield, as well as on the relics of Shelley, on The Age of Dryden, on Richmond on the Thames, and a History of Italian Literature. The Twilight of the Gods, published in 1888 with other tales, was a brilliant jeu-d'esprit. He has also contributed much to encyclopædias and the Dictionary of National Biography, and was responsible for two of the volumes of English Literature, an Illustrated Record (4 vols. 1903; the other volumes by Mr Gosse). He is LL.D. and C.B.

Theodore Watts-Dunton. Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, poet, novelist, and critic, was born at St Ives, Huntingdon, in 1832. At the age of eleven he was sent to a private school at Cambridge, and he received there and afterwards at home an elaborate education. At an early period of his life, in order to learn the Romany language, he saw much of the gypsies, and had those remarkable experiences with them which lend perhaps the chief colour to Aylwin and The Coming of Love. In 1875, having settled in London, he became a prominent figure in a famous group of poets, and the leading critic of poetry on the Examiner and the Athenæum. Afterwards he took the same position on the Encyclopædia Britannica, contributing to it a treatise on 'Poetry,' which has been described by an eminent writer as 'the literary crown of that vast work.' This essay is alone sufficient to show how deep has been his study of poetic principles, and

how completely justified was Mr Swinburne in styling him the first critic of our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age.' In 1897 he published The Jubilee Greeting to the Men of Greater Britain, and in the same year his long-looked-for volume of collected poems, The Coming of Love, which immediately set him in the front rank of contemporary poets. In the following year he published Aylwin, a poetical romance, which was placed by Lord Acton and Mr G. B. Gooch, in The Annals of Politics and Culture, first amongst the three most important books published in England in 1898. Henry Aylwin, in this story, and Percy Aylwin, in The Coming of Love, may be regarded as the embodiment of his philosophy of life. The two cousins, Henry Aylwin of the romance, and Percy Aylwin of the poem, are phases of a modern Hamlet, a Hamlet who stands at the portals of the outer darkness, gazing with eyes made wistful by the loss of a beloved woman. In both the romance and the poem the theme is love at war with death, or, to use the words of the author, in his preface to the illustrated edition of Aylwin:

It is a story written as a comment on Love's warfare with death-written to show that confronted as man is every moment by signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the unknown country beyond Orion where the beloved dead are loving us still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything else-a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes intensified when a man has lost -or thinks he has lost-a woman whose love was the only light of his world-when his soul is torn from his body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the 'viewless winds' right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter darkness and loneliness. It was to depict this phase of human emotion that both Aylwin and The Coming of Love were written. They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer's soul, sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world-sent out to find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was, without knowing it, akin.

In Aylwin the problem is symbolised by the victory of love over sinister circumstance, whereas in the poem it is symbolised by a kind of unistic dream of Natura Benigna. Aylwin is so full of portraits of men of genius that no one can form a vivid conception of the higher literary and artistic life of the mid-Victorian epoch who has not studied it. Notwithstanding the vogue of Aylwin, there is no doubt that it is on his poems, such as The Coming of Love, Christmas at the Mermaid, Praphetic Pictures at Venice, John the Pilgrim, The Omnipotence of Love, The Three Fausts, What the Silent Voices Said, Apollo in Paris, The WoodHaunter's Dream, The Octopus of the Golden Isles, The Last Walk with Jowett from Boar's Hill, and Omar Khayyam, that Mr Watts-Dunton's future

position will mainly rest. There is only room here to touch upon The Coming of Love, a poem which, as a critic has said, 'has its chances for all time.'

Percy Aylwin is a poet and a sailor with such an absorbing love for the sea that he has no room for any other passion: to him an imprisoned sea-bird is a sufferer almost more pitiable than an imprisoned man, as will be seen by the following extract from the opening section of the poem :

Mother Carey's Chicken.

[Percy, on seeing a storm-petrel in a cage on a cottage wall near Gypsy Dell, takes down the cage, with the view of releasing the bird.]

I cannot brook thy gaze, beloved bird;

That sorrow is more than human in thine eye;

Too deeply, brother, is my spirit stirred

To see thee here, beneath the landsmen's sky, Cooped in a cage with food thou canst not eat, Thy 'snow-flake' soiled, and soiled those conquering feet That walked the billows, while thy'sweet-sweet-sweet' Proclaimed the tempest nigh.

Bird whom I welcomed while the sailors cursed,

Friend whom I blessed wherever keels may roam,
Prince of my childish dreams, whom mermaids nursed
In purple of billows-silver of ocean-foam,
Abashed I stand before the mighty grief

That quells all other: Sorrow's King and Chief,
Who rides the wind and holds the sea in fief,
Then finds a cage for home!

From out thy jail thou seest yon heath and woods,
But canst thou hear the birds or smell the flowers?
Ah, no! those rain-drops twinkling on the buds
Bring only visions of the salt sea-showers.
'The sea!' the linnets pipe from hedge and heath;
'The sea!' the honeysuckles whisper and breathe,
And tumbling waves, where those wild-roses wreathe,
Murmur from inland bowers.

These winds so soft to others-how they burn!

The mavis sings with gurgle and ripple and plash,
To thee yon swallow seems a wheeling tern;
And when the rain recalls the briny lash,
Old Ocean's kiss we love-oh, when thy sight
Is mocked with Ocean's horses-manes of white,
The long and shadowy flanks, the shoulders bright-
Bright as the lightning's flash-

When all these scents of heather and brier and whin,
All kindly breaths of land-shrub, flower, and vine,
Recall the sea-scents, till thy feathered skin

Tingles in answer to a dream of brine

When thou, remembering there thy royal birth,
Dost see between the bars a world of dearth,

Is there a grief-a grief on all the earth-

So heavy and dark as thine?

But I can buy thy freedom-I (thank God !),
Who loved thee more than albatross or gull-
Loved thee, and loved the waves thy footsteps trod-
Dreamed of thee when, becalmed, we lay a-hull-
'Tis I, thy friend, who once, a child of six,
To find where Mother Carey fed her chicks,
Climbed up the boat and then with bramble sticks
Tried all in vain to scull-

Right home to fields no seamew ever kenned,
Where scarce the great sea-wanderer fares with thee,

I come to take thee-nay, 'tis I, thy friend!
Ah, tremble not-I come to set thee free;

I come to tear this cage from off this wall,
And take thee hence to that fierce festival
Where billows march and winds are musical,
Hymning the Victor-Sea !

Yea, lift thine eyes to mine.

Dost know me now?

Thou 'rt free! thou'rt free! Ah, surely a bird can smile! Dost know me, Petrel? Dost remember how

I fed thee in the wake for many a mile, Whilst thou wouldst pat the waves, then, rising, take The morsel up and wheel about the wake? Thou 'rt free, thou 'rt free, but for thine own dear sake I keep thee caged awhile.

Away to sea! no matter where the coast :

The road that turns for home turns never wrong; Where waves run high my bird will not be lost :

His home I know: 'tis where the winds are strong

Where, on a throne of billows, rolling hoary
And green and blue and splashed with sunny glory,
Far, far from shore-from farthest promontory—
Prophetic Nature bares the secret of the story

That holds the spheres in song!

Percy, carrying the bird in the cage, suddenly comes upon a landsman friend of his, a Romany Rye (presumably the late F. H. Groome), who is just parting from a young gypsy-girl. She is so beautiful that Percy stands dazzled and forgets the petrel. It is symbolical of the inner meaning of the story that the bird now pushes its way through the half-open door and flies away. From that moment, through the magic of love, to Percy the land is richer than the sea, and this ends the first phase of the story. The first kiss between the two lovers is thus described :

If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,

Is heaven a dream? Is she I claspt a dream?
Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam
And miles of furze shine yellow down the west?
I seem to clasp her still-still on my breast
Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.
I think she kissed these lips, for now they seem
Scarce mine so hallowed of the lips they pressed.
Yon thicket's breath-can that be eglantine?
Those birds-can they be Morning's choristers ?
Can this be Earth? Can these be banks of furze?
Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!
I seem to know them, though this body of mine
Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!

Percy stays with the gypsies, and the gypsy-girl, Rhona, teaches him Romany. This arouses the jealousy of a gypsy rival-Herne the 'Scollard.' Percy Aylwin's family afterwards succeeds in separating him from her, and he is again sent to sea. While cruising among the coral islands he receives the letter from Rhona which of itself paints her character with unequalled vividness :

Rhona's Letter.

On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams the day
When Herne the Scollard come and said to me,
Hes off, that rye o yourn, gone clean away
Till swallow-time; hes left this letter: see.
In dreams I heerd the bee and grasshopper,
Like on that mornin, buz in Rington Hollow,
Shell live till swallow-time and then she 11 mer,
For never will a rye come back to her
Wot leaves her till the comin o the swallow.

All night I heerd them bees and grasshoppers;
All night I smelt the breath o grass and may,
Mixed sweet wi smells o honey from the furze
Like on that mornin when you went away;
All night I heerd in dreams my daddy sal

gentleman

die

gentleman

song

She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver throat
Will meet the stonechat in the buddin whin,
And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie ull float
From light-green boughs through leaves a-peepin thin;
The wheat-ear soon ull bring the willow-wren,
And then the fust fond nightingale ull follow,
A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen
Still out at sea, the spring is in our glen ;
Come, darlin, wi the comin o the swallow.
And she wur gone! And then I read the words
In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;
They made the Christmas sing with summer birds,
And spring-leaves shine on every frozen tree;
And when the dawnin kindled Rington spire,
And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and lollo
Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o fire,
Another night, I sez, has brought him nigher;
Hes comin wi the comin o the swallow.

And soon the bull-pups found me on the Pool-
You know the way they barks to see me slide-
But when the skatin bors o Rington scool
Comed on, it turned my head to see em glide.
I seemed to see you twirlin on your skates,
And somethin made me clap my hans and hollo;
Its him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s.

But when I woke-like-Im the gal wot waits
Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.

Comin seemed ringin in the Christmas-chime;
Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,

In beads o frost along the nets o rime,

Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;
And when the pups began to bark and play,

red

cutting

And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock and wallow Among the snow and fling it up like spray,

I says to them, You know who rote to say

Hes comin wi the comin o the swallow.

The thought ont makes the snow-drifts o December
Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o spring

Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups, remember;
If not for me no singin birds ull sing:
No chorin chiriklo ull hold the gale
Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, over hill and hollow:
There Il be no crakin o the meadow-rail,
Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale,
For her wot waits the comin o the swallow.

cuckoo

laugh

Nor yit a mumply gorgie-Ill forgive her.

miserable

gentile