There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the nineteenth century.  The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats.  By 1822 the blossoming time was over, and the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with young Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning.  It broke forth again, in 1842 and did not practically cease till England’s greatest laureate sang of the “Crossing of the Bar.”  But while Tennyson put out his full strength in 1842, and Mr. Browning rather later, in “Bells and Pomegranates” ("Men and Women"), the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris’s “Defence of Guenevere,” and flowered till Mr. Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon” appeared in 1865, followed by his poems of 1866.  Mr. Rossetti’s book of 1870 belonged, in date of composition, mainly to this period.

In 1858, when “The Defence of Guenevere” came out, Mr. Morris must have been but a year or two from his undergraduateship.  Every one has heard enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon, and the others of the old Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where Mr. Morris’s wonderful prose fantasies are buried.  Why should they not be revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams?  As literature, I prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris’s later romances in prose—­“The Hollow Land” above “News from Nowhere!” Mr. Morris and his friends were active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part.  This revival is more “innerly,” as the Scotch say, more intimate, more “earnest” than the larger and more genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott.  The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris’s first poems.  The fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his “period.”  In “The Defence of Guenevere” he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires “The Life and Death of Jason” and “The Earthly Paradise.”  In the early book the rugged style of Mr. Browning has left a mark.  There are cockney rhymes, too, such as “short” rhyming to “thought.”  But, on the whole, Mr. Morris’s early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it.  In the first poem, “The Queen’s Apology,” is this passage:—­

   “Listen:  suppose your time were come to die,
   And you were quite alone and very weak;
   Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily

   “The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
   Of river through your broad lands running well: 
   Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak: 

   “’One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
   Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
   I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

   “‘Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!’
   Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
   At foot of your familiar bed to see