kind. In later life he also gave much of his
time to political and social work, with the object of bringing back
mankind into a path from which they had strayed since the end of the
Middle Ages, and creating a state of society in which art, by the
people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user, might be
naturally, easily, and universally produced.

Even as a boy Morris had been noted for his love of reading and
inventing tales; but he did not begin to write any until he had been
for a couple of years at Oxford. His earliest poems and his earliest
written prose tales belong to the same year, 1855, in which he
determined to make art his profession. The first of either that he
published appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was
started and managed by him and his friends in 1856. In 1858, after he
had left Oxford, he brought out a volume of poems called, after the
title of the first poem in the book, "The Defence of Guenevere." Soon
afterwards he founded, with some of his old Oxford friends and others
whom he had made in London, among whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the
leading spirit, the firm of Morris and Company, manufacturers and
decorators. His business, in which he was the principal and finally
the sole partner, took up the main part of his time. He had also
married, and built himself a beautiful small house in Kent, the
decoration of which went busily on for several years. Among all these
other occupations he almost gave up writing stories, but never ceased
reading and thinking about them. In 1865 he came back to live in
London, where, being close to his work, he had more leisure for other
things; and between 1865 and 1870 he wrote between thirty and forty
tales in verse, containing not less than seventy or eighty thousand
lines in all. The longest of these tales, "The Life and Death of
Jason," appeared in 1867. It is the old Greek story of the ship Argo
and the voyage in quest of the Golden Fleece. Twenty-five other tales
are included in "The Earthly Paradise," published in three parts
between 1868 and 1870.

During these years Morris learned Icelandic, and his next published
works were translations of some of the Icelandic sagas, writings
composed from six to nine hundred years ago, and containing a mass of
legends, histories and romances finely told in a noble language. These
translations were followed in 1876 by his great epic poem, "Sigurd the
Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs."