* * * * * COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS TAUCHNITZ EDITION. VOL. 2378. POEMS BY WILLIAM MORRIS. IN ONE VOLUME. A SELECTION FROM THE POEMS OF WILLIAM MORRIS. Edited with a Memoir by Francis Hueffer. Copyright Edition. Leipzig Bernhard Tauchnitz 1886. The Right of Translation is reserved. MEMOIR OF WILLIAM MORRIS. William Morris, poet, decorative designer and socialist, was born in 1834 at Clay Street, Walthamstow, now almost a suburb of London, at that time a country village in Essex. He went to school at Marlborough College and thence to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1857. During his stay in the University the subsequent mode of his life was prepared and foreshadowed in two important directions. Like most poets Morris was not what is called very assiduous "at his book"; the routine of college training was no more an attraction to him than the ordinary amusements and dissipations of undergraduate existence. But he was studious all the same, reading the classics in his own somewhat spasmodic way and exploring with even greater zeal the mysteries of mediæval lore. His fellow-worker in these studies and his most intimate friend was and is at the present day Mr. Burne Jones, the famous painter, at that time a student of divinity. Artistic and literary pursuits thus went hand in hand, and received additional zest when the two young men became acquainted with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and other painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school who came to Oxford to execute the frescoes still dimly visible on the ceiling of the Union Debating Hall. Of the aims and achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and of the revival of mediæval feeling in art and literature originally advocated by its members ample account has been given in the memoir of Rossetti prefixed to his poems in the Tauchnitz edition. Its influence on Morris's early work, both in matter and form, will strike every observant reader of the opening ballads of the present collection. Later on the poet worked out for himself a distinct and individual phase of the mediæval movement, as will be mentioned by and by. At one time little was wanting to make Morris follow his friend Burne Jones's example and leave the pen for the brush. There is indeed still extant from his hand an unfinished picture evincing a remarkable sense of colour. He also for a short time became a pupil of the late Mr. G. E. Street, the architect, to whose genius London owes its finest modern Gothic building--the Law Courts in the Strand. On second thoughts, however, Morris came to the conclusion that poetry was his true field of action. His first literary venture was a monthly periodical started under his auspices in 1856 and called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_. It contained, amongst other contributions from Morris's pen, a prose tale of a highly romantic character, and was, as