ABSTRACT
So familiar is the story to our readers that we need hardly retell it. Suffice it to say that Mr. Morris has treated it in a manner fully worthy of the heroic plan. The style he has adopted is more exalted and less idyllic, more rapturous and less luxurious-in a word, more spirited and more virile than that of any of his earlier works. His first small volume was full of colour and quaint form; it reproduced with unequalled brilliance the strange romantic beauty of minute mediaeval architecture and ornament. But there seemed more of art than of nature, more of culture than of inspiration. In Jason the whole field of vision was enlarged and humanized; there was less attention paid to detail but more to composition; there was manifest for the first time a power of poetic narrative unrivalled in our time. In the Earthly Paradise the same delightful qualities were continued and ripened, but the chord of melancholy languor was dwelt upon almost to excess. In Love is Enough higher places of the imagination were reached, and the mystical sadness had a nobler bearing. In the Story of Sigurd, however, for the first time, Mr. Morris is no longer 'the idle singer of an empty day,' but the interpreter of high desires and ancient heroic hopes as fresh as the dawn of the world and as momentous. The atmosphere of this poem is sharp and cold; a strong sense of the primal virtues, of honour, physical courage, duty to the gods and the kings, tender homage to women, interpenetrates the entire theme and gives it a solemn and archaic air. No lesser genius would have succeeded in winging a level flight through so many thousand lines without sinking to the plane of common men and common thoughts. In this poem, so steeped is the author in the records of the heroic past, so intimately are his sympathies connected with those of the mythical age of which
he writes, that we walk with demigods to the close, and have no need to be told of the stature ofour companions. In the presence ofso much simplicity, and so much art that conceals its art, it is well to point out how supreme is the triumph of the poet in this respect. It is perhaps on this very account, and because the ordinary tone of the poeln is so elevated and so heroic, that the passages which allow of pastoral and emotional treatment seem of unequalled charm and delicacy. Where so much is noble, but where all is rapidly-progressing narrative, it is not easy to select a passage for quotationwhich will not lose its peculiar excellence by being separated from its context. Perhaps the first meeting ofGudrun and Brynhildwill bear extraction aswell as anyother:-
So they make the yoke-beasts ready, and dight the wains for the way, And the maidens gather together, and their bodies they array, And gird the laps of the linen, and do on the dark blue gear, And bind with the leaves of summer the wandering of their hair: Then they drive by dale and acre, o'er heath and holt they wend, Till they come to the land of the waters, and the lea by the woodland's end; And there is the burg of Brynhild, the white-walled house and long, And the garth her fathers fashioned before the days of \vrong.
