“His words nigh made me weep, but while he spoke
   I noted how a mocking smile just broke
   The thin line of the Prince’s lips, and he
   Who carried the afore-named armoury
   Puffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low: 
   But the King smiled, and said, ’Can it be so? 
   I know not, and ye twain are such as find
   The things whereto old kings must needs be blind. 
   For you the world is wide—­but not for me,
   Who once had dreams of one great victory
   Wherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,
   And now, the victor in so many an one,
   Find that in Asia Alexander died
   And will not live again; the world is wide
   For you I say,—­for me a narrow space
   Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place. 
      Poor man, why should I stay thee? live thy fill
   Of that fair life, wherein thou seest no ill
   But fear of that fair rest I hope to win
   One day, when I have purged me of my sin. 
      Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king
   Shall be remembered but by this one thing,
   That on the morn before ye crossed the sea
   Ye gave and took in common talk with me;
   But with this ring keep memory with the morn,
   O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn
   Remember me, who am of Odin’s blood.’”

All this encounter is a passage of high invention.  The adventures in Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out to find Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was not remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl.  The tale of the wanderers was Mr. Morris’s own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race, fairy tales coming to us, now “softly breathed through the flutes of the Grecians,” now told by Sagamen of Iceland.  The whole performance is astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be climbed.  Once more literature has a narrator, on the whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir Walter.  Humour and action are not so prominent as contemplation of a pageant reflected in a fairy mirror.  But Mr. Morris has said himself, about his poem, what I am trying to say:—­

      “Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;
   Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
   Though still the less we knew of its intent;
   The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
   Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
   Hung round about a little room, where play
   Weeping and laughter of man’s empty day.”