ABSTRACT
Your invitation, my dear Editor, gives me a welcome opportunity of recognising the special claims to notice ofMr. William Morris's House of the Wolfings. None of his recent writings will be generally read, I think, with more unqualified pleasure. His genius has always seemed to breathe most freely in the atmosphere ofprehistoric or semi-historic mythology, whether Gothic or Greek, and the subject of his present choice happily affords scope for illustrating certain characteristic conceptions which the Gothic and the Greek minds held in common. For the material framework ofhis epic he has resorted to Northern Europe at the time of the earliest Roman invasion, when the Gothic communities upon the banks of the Elbe kept their primitive institutions of Mark, Thing and Folk-mote unchanged; when totemism and exoganlY were still inviolate customs, and the grim religion of Odinism maintained its hold upon the affections and satisfied the aspirations of its believers. The spiritual motives and human interest of the story are independent of time and place, and turn upon the eternal conflict between Love, Fate and Conscience, the doubtful issue of which is finally determined by the 'stern lawgiver' Duty. The level of the prose
narrative is broken at frequent intervals by waves of ballad-verse, appropriate to the utterances of the chief speakers, and occasionally varied by lyrical outbursts of more impassioned feeling.
