is dream-like.  I believe that the singular lack which one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris’ dislike of rhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse.  Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includes eloquence, and life includes morality.  The poetry of Morris is sensuous, as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention from the generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lost between the general and the concrete, which all really great poetry preserves.  Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhaps too much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is full of truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and uttered with passionate conviction.  One looks in vain in Morris’ pages for such things as

“There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away”;

or

              “—­the good die first,
  ——­And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust,
  Burn to the socket.”

Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as has once before been said.  Not that quotability is an absolute test of poetic value, for then Pope would rank higher than Spenser or Shelley.  But its absence in Morris is significant in more than one way.

While “The Earthly Paradise” was in course of composition, a new intellectual influence came into Morris’ life, the influence of the Icelandic sagas.  Much had been done to make Old Norse literature accessible to English readers since the days when Gray put forth his Runic scraps and Percy translated Mallet.[53] Walter Scott, e.g., had given an abstract of the “Eyrbyggja Saga.”  Amos Cottle had published at Bristol in 1797 a metrical version of the mythological portion of the “Elder Edda” ("Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund"), with an introductory verse epistle by Southey.  Sir George Dasent’s translation of the “Younger Edda” appeared in 1842; Laing’s “Heimskringla” in 1844; Dasent’s “Burnt Nial” in 1861; his “Gisli the Outlaw,” and Head’s “Saga of Viga-Glum” in 1866.  William and Mary Howitt’s “Literature and Romance of Northern Europe” appeared in 1852.  Morris had made the acquaintance of Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology” (1851) and “Yuletide Stories” (1853) at Oxford; two of the tales in “The Earthly Paradise” were suggested by them:  “The Land East of the Sun” and “The Fostering of Aslaug.”  These, however, he had dealt with independently and in an ultra-romantic spirit.  But in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr. Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number of translations.[54] “The Lovers of Gudrun” in “The Earthly Paradise” was taken from the “Laxdaela Saga,” and is in marked contrast with the other poems in the collection.  There is no romantic glamour about it.  It is a grim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings.  Save