If the poetry in Lord de Tabley’s volume answers as little to Milton’s famous list of the poetic requirements, “simple, sensuous, and passionate,” as does Milton’s own poetry, which answers to only the second of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neither sensuous nor passionate. The so-called coldness displayed by ‘Lycidas’ arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Milton’s part of sorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he would not be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory. Of course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and how various are poetry’s domains. For if in one mood poetry is the simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof of art, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings. In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right to demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry. It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new “leading poet” of the hour are awarded to “felicitous lines,” every felicity of which is rhetorical and not poetical. VII. WILLIAM MORRIS. 1834–1896. I. The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris’s illness prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow. The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have been phthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had become exhausted. Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us all—that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he to whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, “Enjoy.” [Picture: William Morris]