nter into the decorative artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colour
had run out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing eccentric
or knotty about "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise."
On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had
appeared in modern literature--a poetic lubberland, a "clear, unwrinkled
song." The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought on
the long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the
rime, his eye soothed--not excited--by ever-unrolling panoramas of an
enchanted country "east of the sun and west of the moon." Morris wrote
with incredible ease and rapidity. It was a maxim with him, as with
Ruskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to the
workman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said of
Chaucer--that he never "puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse."
Chaucer was his avowed master,[47] and perhaps no English narrative poet
has come so near to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not
invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm.
His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott's; lacking the fire
and nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at a
higher artistic level. He had the copious vein of the mediaeval
chroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and with
finer resources of invention. He had none of Chaucer's humour, realism,
or skill in character sketching. In its final impression his poetry
resembles Spenser's more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it grows
monotonous--without quite growing languid--from the steady flow of the
metre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery. The reader becomes,
somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry
more passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott,
have a way of making old things seem near to us. In Spenser and Morris,
though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at an
infinite remove, in a world apart--

"--a little isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea"

which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life.

"Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden
Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a series of twenty-four narrative poems
set in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in
the reign of Edw