nth century
was his ideal period always"--the century which produced the lovely
French romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals which
he admired above all other architecture on earth. But this admiration
was aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in
Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early
Oxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the
fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a
reaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic,
and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been
destined to holy orders. We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerly
reading the "Acta Sanctorum," the "Tracts for the Times," and Kenelm
Digby's "Mores Catholici," and projecting a kind of monastic community,
where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated. But later
impressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchly
asceticism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no part of
Morris' social ideal. The body counted for much with him. In "News from
Nowhere," marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it is
merely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party. Morris
had a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts.
He complains that Swinburne's poetry is "founded on literature, not on
nature." His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan
earth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming death." His
paradise is an "Earthly Paradise"; it is in search of earthly immortality
that his voyagers set sail. "Of heaven or hell," says his prelude, "I
have no power to sing"; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hell
who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than to
Walter Scott.

Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equivalent of his work as
a decorative artist, who cared little for easel pictures, and regarded
painting as one method out of many for covering wall spaces or other
surfaces.[30] His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical or
lyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Rossetti's. In its
objective spirit and even distribution of emphasis, it contrasts with
Rossetti's expressional intensity very much as Morris' wall-paper and
tapestry designs contrast with paintings like "Beata Beatrix" and
"Proserpina." Morris--as