and
O June, O June, that we desired so,
Wilt thou not make us happy on this day?--
--it is, indeed, unnecessary to add example to example--are of the
highest order of lyric poetry. The lusty strength and naked passion
of _Sigurd the Volsung_ are as yet unattempted at any sustained
pressure, but in all other respects the achievement of _Jason_ and
_The Earthly Paradise_ is complete and representative. Remembering
Pope's "awful Aristarch"--
Thy mighty Scholiast, whose unweary'd pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.
Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain,
Critics like me shall make it Prose again--
I have refrained from any attempt to re-tell the stories that must be
read as Morris told them or not at all. It has been my purpose
rather to hold for a moment in trembling hands the spirit that is in
them and that went to their creation.
At the time of publication of the last volume of _The Earthly
Paradise_, Morris had begun the study of Icelandic story that was to
find its splendid culmination six years later in _Sigurd the
Volsung_. The history of these beginnings will be told more fitly
later in connection with the consideration of that poem. The
completion of his great cycle of tales left him momentarily with a
sense of purposelessness. 'I feel rather lost at having done my
book,' he writes. 'I must try to get something serious to do as soon
as may be ... perhaps something else of importance will turn up
soon.' He turned again to painting, and occupied some of his time in
book-illumination, an art in which he attained a perfection no less
memorable than that of the mediæval masters. The business of Morris
and Company was developing rapidly, and in 1871 he found a new
interest in Kelmscott House, the old manor in Oxfordshire that was to
be his country home until his death. The abiding pleasure that his
retreat afforded him has been beautifully pictured for us in Mr.
Mackail's "Life." In the same year he made his first journey to
Iceland, and on his return he wrote the poem, which is next to be
considered, _Love is Enough_.
[1] Mr. Stopford Brooke.
V