“A great God’s angel standing, with such dyes,
   Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
   Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

   “Showing him well, and making his commands
   Seem to be God’s commands, moreover, too,
   Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

   “And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,
   Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
   No man could tell the better of the two.

   “After a shivering half-hour you said,
   ‘God help! heaven’s colour, the blue;’ and he said, ‘Hell.’ 
   Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

“And cry to all good men that loved you well,
‘Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.’”

There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the bizarrerie of a new thing in beauty.  How far it is really beautiful how can I tell?  How can I discount the “personal bias”?  Only I know that it is unforgettable.  Again (Galahad speaks):—­

         “I saw
   One sitting on the altar as a throne,
      Whose face no man could say he did not know,
   And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,
      With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow.”

Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.

Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on his especially sympathetic period—­the gloom and sad sunset glory of the late fourteenth century, the age of Froissart and wicked, wasteful wars.  To Froissart it all seemed one magnificent pageant of knightly and kingly fortunes; he only murmurs a “great pity” for the death of a knight or the massacre of a town.  It is rather the pity of it that Mr. Morris sees:  the hearts broken in a corner, as in “Sir Peter Harpedon’s End,” or beside “The Haystack in the Floods.”  Here is a picture like life of what befell a hundred times.  Lady Alice de la Barde hears of the death of her knight:—­

“ALICE

      “Can you talk faster, sir? 

Get over all this quicker? fix your eyes
On mine, I pray you, and whate’er you see
Still go on talking fast, unless I fall,
Or bid you stop.

“SQUIRE

      “I pray your pardon then,

And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say
I am unhappy that your knight is dead. 
Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all. 
We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
And scant five hundred had he in that hold;
His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;
Yet for three days about the barriers there
The deadly glaives were gather’d, laid across,
And push’d and pull’d; the fourth our engines came;
But still amid the crash of falling walls,
And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,
The steady bow-strings flash’d, and still stream’d out
St. George’s banner, and the seven swords,
And still they cried, ‘St. George Guienne,’ until
Their walls were flat as Jericho’s of old,
And our rush came, and cut them from the keep.”