sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of ’The Heart of Midlothian,’ for instance, thought himself continually bound to seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic architecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having been taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by a named man under academical rules.” [32]

It is worth while to glance at Morris’ culture-history and note the organic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism.  He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched a fearful joy from Clara Reeve’s “Old English Baron.” [33] He knew his Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualified admiration only for such things as “Oriana” and “The Lady of Shalott.”  He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Duerer’s “Knight, Death and the Devil” in an English translation of Fouque’s “Sintram.” [34] Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin’s Edinburgh lectures of 1854 and by the illustration to Allingham’s “Maids of Elfin Mere,” over which Morris and Burne-Jones “pored continually.”  Morris devoured greedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French and English; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors.  He disliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost of modern English poets.  He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetry or Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the “Morte Darthur,” which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible.  The Border ballads had been his delight since childhood.  An edition of these; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a “Morte Darthur,” with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the unfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press.

Morris’ first volume, “The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems,” was put forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); “a book,” says Saintsbury, “almost as much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson’s early work was of the first.” [35] “Many of the poems,” wrote William Bell Scott, “represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by a sentimental, nineteenth-century-revival mediaevalism, but they give a poetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real.” [36] These last words point at Tennyson.  The first four pieces in the volume are on Arthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception even from such poems as “The Lady of Shalott” and “Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.”  They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris’ later work.  If the name-poem is put beside Tennyson’s idyl “Guinevere”; or “Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery,” beside Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” the difference is striking.