It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. “Look at Gladstone,” he would say; “look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work.” No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the “dry light of intelligence,” a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement not of “the thinking machine” only, but of the whole man—the whole “genial” nature of the worker—his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true _vis vitæ_. We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amount to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collaborating of the ‘Völsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared since his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words, and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.