," with the same episode in "Jason." "Soon was he 'ware of a
spring," says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grew
thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and
blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In
the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the
sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and
Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out
the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the
nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered
the soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the black
water." [52] In "Jason," where the episode occupies some two hundred and
seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in
furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side
with a Pre-Raphaelite song:

"I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose";

the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poems
except possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane";

"In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake,
Love, be merry for my sake:
Twine the blossoms in my hair.
Kiss me where I am most fair--
Kiss me, love! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?"

This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistence
of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich year
slipping by."

Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": the
octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with
Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion
of Hunt and Keats.

"Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and
treating a subject from the "Mabinogion," appeared in 1873, Mackail
praises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action"
(Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but
the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of
the author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For
something is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a rich
profusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion is
not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language,
and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lac