by the name of Edward Burne-Jones.  Burne-Jones was studying theology.  He was slender in stature, dreamy, spiritual, poetic.  Morris was a giant in strength, blunt in speech, bold in manner, and had a shock of hair like a lion’s mane.  This was in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three—­these young men being nineteen years of age.  The slender, yellow, dreamy student of theology and the ruddy athlete became fast friends.

“Send your sons to college and the boys will educate them,” said Emerson.  These boys read poetry together; and it seems the first author that specially attracted them was Mrs. Browning; and she attracted them simply because she had recently eloped with the man she loved.  This fact proved to Morris that she was a worthy woman and a discerning.  She had the courage of her convictions.  To elope with a poor poet, leaving a rich father and a luxurious home—­what nobler ambition?

Burne-Jones, student of theology, considered her action proof of depravity.  Morris, in order to show his friend that Mrs. Browning was really a rare and gentle soul, read aloud to Burne-Jones from her books.  Morris himself had never read much of Mrs. Browning’s work, but in championing her cause and interesting his friend in her, he grew interested himself.  Like lawyers, we undertake a cause first and look for proof later.  In teaching another, Morris taught himself.  By explaining a theme it becomes luminous to us.

In passing, it is well to note that this impulse in the heart of William Morris to come to the defense of an accused person was ever very strong.  His defense of Mrs. Browning led straight to “The Defense of Guinevere,” begun while at Oxford and printed in book form in his twenty-fourth year.  Not that the offenses of Guinevere and Elizabeth Barrett were parallel, but Morris was by nature a defender of women.  And it should further be noted that Tennyson had not yet written his “Idylls of the King,"-at the time Morris wrote his poetic brief.

Another author that these young men took up at this time was Ruskin.  John Ruskin was fifteen years older than Morris—­an Oxford man, too; also, the son of a merchant and rich by inheritance.  Ruskin’s natural independence, his ability for original thinking and his action in embracing the cause of Turner, the ridiculed, won the heart of Morris.  In Ruskin he found a writer who expressed the thoughts that he believed.  He read Ruskin, and insisted that Burne-Jones should.  Together they read “The Nature of Gothic,” and then they went out upon the streets of Oxford and studied examples at first hand.  They compared the old with the new, and came to the conclusion that the buildings erected two centuries before had various points to recommend them which modern buildings have not.  The modern buildings were built by contractors, while the old ones were constructed by men who had all the time there was, and so they worked out their conceptions of the eternal fitness of things.