Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,[50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable.  “Troy,” says his biographer, “is to his imagination a town exactly like Bruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city of King Aeetes in ‘The Life and Death of Jason’) with towers and swinging bells.  The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at the barriers.” [51] The distinction between classical and romantic treatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus’ idyl “Hylas,” with the same episode in “Jason.”  “Soon was he ’ware of a spring,” says the Syracusan poet, “in a hollow land, and the rushes grew thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land.  In the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes.  And now the boy was holding out the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered the soft hearts of all of them.  Then down he sank into the black water.” [52] In “Jason,” where the episode occupies some two hundred and seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side with a Pre-Raphaelite song: 

  “I know a little garden close
  Set thick with lily and red rose”;

the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris’ narrative poems except possibly the favourite two-part song in “Ogier the Dane”;

  “In the white-flower’d hawthorne brake,
  Love, be merry for my sake: 
  Twine the blossoms in my hair. 
  Kiss me where I am most fair—­
  Kiss me, love! for who knoweth
  What thing cometh after death?”

This is the strain which recurs in all Morris’ poetry with the insistence of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of “the rich year slipping by.”

Three kinds of verse are employed in “The Earthly Paradise”:  the octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, “enjambed” fashion of Hunt and Keats.

“Love is Enough,” in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and treating a subject from the “Mabinogion,” appeared in 1873, Mackail praises its delicate mechanism in the use of “receding planes of action” (Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of the author’s genius.  What is the matter with Morris’ poetry?  For something is the matter with it.  Beauty is there in abundance, a rich profusion of imagery.  The narrative moves without a hitch.  Passion is not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, and the final impression