“Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows
Not loud, but as a cow begins to low.” [42]

“Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween,
Because the moon shone like a star she shed
When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago,
And ruled all things but God.” [43]

            “Quiet groans
  That swell out the little bones
  Of my bosom.” [44]

“I sit on a purple bed,
Outside, the wall is red,
Thereby the apple hangs,
And the wasp, caught by the fangs,
Dies in the autumn night. 
And the bat flits till light,
And the love-crazed knight
Kisses the long, wet grass.” [45]

A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, monologues or dialogues, sometimes in the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays.[46] Others are ballads, not of the popular variety, but after Rossetti’s fashion, employing burdens, English or French: 

  “Two red roses across the moon”;

  “Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflee”;

  “Ah! qu’elle est belle La Marguerite”; etc.

The only poem in the collection which imitates the style of the old minstrel ballad is “Welland Water.”  The name-poem is in terza rima; the longest, “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” in blank verse; “Golden Wings,” in the “In Memoriaro” stanza.

When Morris again came before the public as a poet, his style had undergone a change akin to that which transformed the Pre-Raphaelite painter into the decorative artist.  The skeins of vivid romantic colour had run out into large-pattern tapestries.  There was nothing eccentric or knotty about “The Life and Death of Jason” and “The Earthly Paradise.”  On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had appeared in modern literature—­a poetic lubberland, a “clear, unwrinkled song.”  The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought on the long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the rime, his eye soothed—­not excited—­by ever-unrolling panoramas of an enchanted country “east of the sun and west of the moon.”  Morris wrote with incredible ease and rapidity.  It was a maxim with him, as with Ruskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to the workman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said of Chaucer—­that he never “puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse.”  Chaucer was his avowed master,[47] and perhaps no English narrative poet has come so near to Chaucer.  Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm.  His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott’s; lacking the fire and nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at a higher artistic level.  He had the copious vein of the mediaeval chroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and with finer resources of invention.  He had none