of Chaucer’s humour, realism, or skill in character sketching.  In its final impression his poetry resembles Spenser’s more than Chaucer’s.  Like Spenser’s, it grows monotonous—­without quite growing languid—­from the steady flow of the metre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery.  The reader becomes, somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry more passionate or intellectual.  Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott, have a way of making old things seem near to us.  In Spenser and Morris, though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at an infinite remove, in a world apart—­

            “—­a little isle of bliss
  Midmost the beating of the steely sea”

which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life.

“Jason” was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden Fleece; “The Earthly Paradise,” a series of twenty-four narrative poems set in a framework of the poet’s own.  Certain gentlemen of Norway, in the reign of Edward III. of England, set out—­like St. Brandan—­on a voyage in search of a land that is free from death.  They cross the Western ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed of their hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient Greece.  There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchange tales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with a mediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete.  Among the wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have a wide range.  There are Norse stories like “The Lovers of Gudrun”; French Charlemagne romances, like “Ogier the Dane”; and late German legends of the fourteenth century, like “The Hill of Venus,” besides miscellaneous travelled fictions of the Middle Age.[48] But the Hellenic legends are reduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader is not very sensible of a difference.  Many of them are selected for their marvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations, and enchantments:  “The Golden Apples,” “Bellerophon,” “Cupid and Psyche,” “The Story of Perseus,” etc.  Even “Jason” is treated as a romance.  Of its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and wanderings of the Argonauts.  Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who effects her lover’s victory and escape.  Her romantic, outweighs her dramatic character.  Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, like those of his own wanderers in “The Earthly Paradise,” were dearer to Morris’ imagination than conflicts of the will; the vostos or home-coming of Ulysses, e.g. He preferred the “Odyssey” to the “Iliad,” and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line of the “Nibelungenlied.” [49] Of the Greek tales in “The Earthly Paradise,” “The Love of Alcestis” has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality.