282 'She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon, Sister Helen, 236 240 244 She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, Her woe's dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!) "They've caught her to Westholm's saddle-bow, Sister Helen, And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.' 'Let it turn whiter than winter snow, Little brother!' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!) 'O Sister Helen, you heard the bell, Sister Helen! 248 More loud than the vesper-chime it fell.' 'No vesper-chime, but a dying knell, Little brother!' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, 252 His dying knell, between Hell and Heaven!) 'Alas! but I fear the heavy sound, Sister Helen; Is it in the sky or in the ground?' 256 'Say, have they turned their horses round, Little brother?' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, What would she more, between Hell and Heaven?) 260 'They have raised the old man from his knee, 264 268 272 Sister Helen, 1 12 'Oh the wind is sad in the iron chill, 276 And weary sad they look by the hill." Little brother!' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, 280 Most sad of all, between Hell and Heaven!) 'See, see, the wax has dropped from its place, And the flames are winning up apace!' 284 'Yet here they burn but for a space, Little brother!' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, Here for a space, between Hell and Heaven!) 288 'Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, 292 Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?' Little brother!' (0 Mother, Mary Mother, Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!) From THE HOUSE OF LIFE. I marked all kindred Powers the heart finds fair: Embrace wherein two sweet arms held him fast; And Youth be dear, and Life be sweet to Love. XXXI. Her Gifts. High grace, the dower of queens; and therewithal Such thrilling pallor of cheek as doth enthral 8 Deep golden locks, her sovereign coronal; A round reared neck, meet column of Love's shrine 12 And soft-stirred feet still answering to his sign: LXV. Known in Vain. As two whose love, first foolish, widening scope, 12 When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze Follow the desultory feet of Death? Under the arch of Life, where love and death, Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe, I drew it in as simply as my breath. Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath, The sky and sea bend on thee, which can draw, By sea or sky or woman, to one law, 8 The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath. 12 This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise Thy voice and hand shake still, long known to thee How passionately and irretrievably, In what fond flight, how many ways and days! LXXXVI. Lost Days. The lost days of my life until to-day, What were they, could I see them on the street Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat 4 Sown once for food but trodden into clay? Or golden coins squandered and still to pay? God knows I know the faces I shall see, thyself,' (lo! each one saith,) CI. The One Hope. When vain desire at last and vain regret -- 4 And teach the unforgetful to forget? Between the scriptured petals softly blown 12 Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er But only the one Hope's one name be there, chaucer WILLIAM MORRIS. WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896) was born at Walthamstow, near London, as the son of a wealthy discount-broker. He studied at the University of Oxford, where he began his lifelong friendships with Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, and with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An early enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, kindled by two trips to France, led him to abandon the idea of a clerical career for that of an artist. Accordingly he worked for a year (1856) under G. E. Street, the celebrated Gothic architect; but, in 1857, through the influence of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, turned to painting, setting up a studio in London. When he married in 1859, the fitting up of the house which he built for himself at Upton, Kent, gave him a chance of practically applying his new artistic principles of decoration, and eventually led to the foundation (1861) of the famous firm of Morris & Co., London, for the manufacture of artistic furniture, painted windows, metal and glass wares, tapestry, wall-papers, and other objects of decorative art, to which he later added book-illuminating, dyeing, and carpet-weaving. For the last years of his life he was mainly engaged in artistic printing with medieval letters, and, in 1890, started the famous 'Kelmscott Press', at Hammersmith, London, which brought out a long series of beautifully printed and costly decorated editions of modern and medieval classics, the magnificent Chaucer of 1896 being perhaps the finest book ever produced. The necessity of having intelligent and able craftsmen for his artistic work drew his attention to the education and the social conditions of the working classes. To promote the former he adopted the practice of giving public lectures on art and decoration. And his enthusiasm for social reform engaged him, for many years, in practical socialism; but, repulsed by the anarchistic tendencies which culminated in the Trafalgar Riots of 1887, he formally withdrew from the 'Socialist League' in 1890, without, however, renouncing a theoretical advocacy of socialistic ideals. From 1871 the fine old Manor House at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, had been his permanent countryhouse. In 1896 he died suddenly in his town-house at Hammersmith. Though literature occupied only the spare hours of his singularly industrious life as an artist and manufacturer, Morris's astounding facility of literary production enabled him to compose a great bulk of highly original work, both in verse and prose. Saturated with the romantic spirit of the Middle Ages, he was preeminently a story-teller, though his first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858), was still half-lyrical in form. But his highest efforts in verse were attained in three long narrative poems, which treat both medieval and classic legends in the naive medieval manner of Chaucer, whom he always acknowledged his chief master in poetry: The Life and Death of Jason (1867), a romantic version of the Golden Fleece story; The Earthly Paradise (4 vols. 1868–70), a series of 24 narratives, which are told by Norsemen and Greek colonists and therefore alternate between medieval and classic tales; and his masterpiece The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876), a magnificent verse-setting of the old Scandinavian Volsunga Saga. His verse-translation of Virgil's Eneid (1875) and Homer's Odyssey (1887) prove this same interest in storytelling, whereas The Tale of Beowulf (1895), which he translated in collaboration with A. J. Wyatt, had for him the additional attraction of being a genuine record of old Germanic life. His imitation of the Middle English miracle play, entitled Love is Enough (1872), is specially remarkable for its various metres, in one of which he tried to revive the old Germanic alliterative verse. His numerous proseworks may be classed under the heads of fiction, art, and socialism. He introduced into English literature a new and peculiar style of romances in his long series of highly imaginative prose-stories, which he wrote during the last ten years of his life such as A Tale of the House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1889), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890), The Wood beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World's End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (posth. 1897), and The Story of the Sundering Flood (posth. 1898). All these tales are written in a peculiar, highly archaic English (mainly taken from Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the 15th century version of the Gesta Romanorum), and, in their form of prose interchanged with verse, are a close imitation of the old Icelandic sagas, some of which he had previously translated into English (e. g. Grettis Saga 1869, Völsunga Saga 1870). The earliest of these prose-romances are half-historical pictures of old Germanic life during the period of the tribal migrations; but the later ones become more and more fabulous, and eventually develop into a new kind of fairy tales. His prose-translations of mediæval legends include Scandinavian sagas as well as Old French romances (Amis and Amile 1894, etc.). Some of his socialistic writings, such as A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1890), are rather Utopian romances than political pamphlets. In the field of decorative art Morris revolutionized the artistic taste not only of his own nation, but of the whole of Western Europe. Of his writings on art may be mentioned his lectures on Art and the Beauty of the Earth (1881) and the fine paper on Westminster Abbey (1898), which he wrote for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. |