ABSTRACT
In Sigurd the Volsung we have at once the manliest and the loveliest work of Mr. Morris's genius. The atmosphere of soft and slightly enervating sadness which pervaded the Earthly Paradise and Jason is replaced by one clearer and more tonic. These Norse heroes fight under skies fraught with storm, and awesome with the shadowy footsteps of the hastening Norns; but theyfight with cheerful and steadfast valor, and they die triumphant. The last word ofall, which 'ends their strange, eventful history,' is not the empty echo of 'in vain! in vain!' but a promise, a watch-word,-or rather a pass-word for admission to a brighter and securer life:-
They are gone, the lonely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient earth: It shall labor and bear the burden as before the days of their birth; It shall groan, in its blind abiding, for the day that Sigurd hath sped; And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh the
dead; It shall yearn and be oft-times holpen, and forget their deeds no more Till the new sun beams on Baldur and the happy, sealess shore.
