The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morris illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by the operation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments.  The comparison which Morris’ biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones holds true as between Morris and Rossetti:  “They received or re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine.”  Morris was twice a Norman, in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas.  His visits to Italy left him cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North.  “With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy.  In spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than elsewhere.  Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long rather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a house north-away.”  Rossetti’s Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced in Morris by an English homeliness—­a materialism which is Teutonic and not Latin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulously Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances.  “His earliest enthusiasms,” said Burne-Jones, “were his latest.  The thirteenth century was his ideal period always”—­the century which produced the lovely French romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals which he admired above all other architecture on earth.  But this admiration was aesthetic rather than religious.  The Catholic note, so resonant in Rossetti’s poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early Oxford days.  The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a reaction had set in.  Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic, and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been destined to holy orders.  We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerly reading the “Acta Sanctorum,” the “Tracts for the Times,” and Kenelm Digby’s “Mores Catholici,” and projecting a kind of monastic community, where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated.  But later impressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour.  Churchly asceticism and the mediaeval “praise of virginity” made no part of Morris’ social ideal.  The body counted for much with him.  In “News from Nowhere,” marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it is merely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party.  Morris had a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts.  He complains that Swinburne’s poetry is “founded on literature, not on nature.”  His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan earth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of “quick-coming death.”  His paradise is an “Earthly Paradise”; it is in search of earthly immortality that his voyagers set sail.  “Of heaven or hell,” says his prelude, “I have no power to sing”; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hell who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than to Walter Scott.