literature or in art. But this idyll was short-lived. Ill-health in the
Burne-Jones family was followed by an illness which befell Morris
himself; and the demand of the growing business and the need for the
master to be nearer at hand forced him to leave Upton. The Red House was
sold in 1865; and first Bloomsbury and later Hammersmith furnished him
with a home more conveniently placed.

The period of his return to London coincided with the most fruitful
period of his poetic work. Already at Oxford he had written some pieces
of verse which had found favour with his friends. He soon found that his
taste and his talent was for narrative poetry; and in 1856 he made
acquaintance with his two supreme favourites, Chaucer and Malory. It is
to them that he owes most in all that he produced in poetry or in prose,
and notably in the _Earthly Paradise_, which he published between 1868
and 1870. This consists of a collection of stories drawn chiefly from
Greek sources, but supposed to be told by a band of wanderers in the
fourteenth century. Thus the classic legends are seen through a veil of
mediaeval romance. He had no wish to step back, in the spirit of a
modern scholar, across the ages of ignorance or mist, and to pick up
the classic stones clear-cut and cold as the Greeks left them. To him
the legends had a continuous history up to the Renaissance; as they were
retold by Romans, Italians, or Provencals, they were as a plant growing
in our gardens, still putting out fresh shoots, not an embalmed corpse
such as later scholars have taught us to exhume and to study in the
chill atmosphere of our libraries and museums. This mediaevalism of his
was much misunderstood, both in literature and in art; people would talk
to him as if he were imitating the windows or tapestries of the Middle
Ages, whereas what he wanted was to recapture the technical secrets
which the true craftsmen had known and then to use these methods in a
live spirit to carry on the work to fresh developments in the future.

If the French tales of the fourteenth century were an inspiration to him
in his earliest poems, a second influence no less potent was that of the
Icelandic Sagas. He began to study them in 1869, and a little later,
with the aid of Professor Magnusson, he was translating some of them
into English. He made two journeys to Iceland, and was deeply moved by
the wild grandeur of the scenes in which these heroic tales were set.
For many successive days