THE WORLD OF ROMANCE

BEING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE Oxford and Cambridge magazine, 1856

By William Morris

London:  Published by J. Thomson at 10,
Craven gardens, Wimbledon, S. W.
MCMVI

In the tales . . . the world is one of pure romance.  Mediaeval customs, mediaeval buildings, the mediaeval Catholic religion, the general social framework of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, are assumed throughout, but it would be idle to attempt to place them in any known age or country. . .  Their author in later years thought, or seemed to think, lightly of them, calling them crude (as they are) and very young (as they are).  But they are nevertheless comparable in quality to Keats’s ‘Endymion’ as rich in imagination, as irregularly gorgeous in language, as full in every vein and fibre of the sweet juices and ferment of the spring.—­J.  W. MACKAIL

In his last year at Oxford, Morris established, assuming the entire financial responsibility, the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,’ written almost entirely by himself and his college friends, but also numbering Rossetti among its contributors.  Like most college ventures, its career was short, ending with its twelfth issue in December, 1856.  In this magazine Morris first found his strength as a writer, and though his subsequent literary achievements made him indifferent to this earlier work, its virility and wealth of romantic imagination justify its rescue from oblivion.

The article on Amiens, intended originally as the first of a series, is included in this volume as an illustration of Morris’s power to clothe things actual with the glamour of Romance.

THE STORY OF THE UNKNOWN CHURCH

I was the master-mason of a church that was built more than six hundred years ago; it is now two hundred years since that church vanished from the face of the earth; it was destroyed utterly,—­no fragment of it was left; not even the great pillars that bore up the tower at the cross, where the choir used to join the nave.  No one knows now even where it stood, only in this very autumn-tide, if you knew the place, you would see the heaps made by the earth-covered ruins heaving the yellow corn into glorious waves, so that the place where my church used to be is as beautiful now as when it stood in all its splendour.  I do not remember very much about the land where my church was; I have quite forgotten the name of it, but I know it was very beautiful, and even now, while I am thinking of it, comes a flood of old memories, and I almost seem to see it again,—­that old beautiful land! only dimly do I see it in spring and summer and winter, but I see it in autumn-tide clearly now; yes, clearer, clearer, oh! so bright and glorious! yet it was beautiful too in spring,