ABSTRACT
When we turn from Swinburne to William Morris we pass into a very different emotional clime. Similar as the two poets are in thoroughness of artistic culture and in width of learning, the personal temperaments which their poems reveal are in some sense complementary. In Swinburne we have seen the vivid but detached intelligence rendering in turn with equal eloquence, and apparently with equal satisfaction, every attitude of mind which the known cosmic laws, construed strictly as against man's hopes, can be shown to justify. In Morris we have a man equally hopeless indeed, but not equally indifferent to hope-steeped, rather, in all the delicate joys, the soft emotions, which make the charm of life, and feeling at every turn with sad discouragement the shadow and imminence ofthe End. He is above all things the poet ofLove; but in his poems love is never without the note ofyearning, the sense ofan unseizable and fugitive joy:-
Love is enough: while ye deemed hima-sleeping, There were signs of his coming and sounds of his feet;
His touch it was that would bring you to weeping, When the summer was deepest and music most sweet: In his footsteps ye followed the day to its dying,
Ye went forth by his gown-skirts the morning to meet: In his place on the beaten-down orchard-grass lying Of the sweet ways ye pondered yet left for life's trying.
