Exception has, no doubt, been taken to certain archaisms in which Morris indulges not only in the epic of ‘Sigurd,’ but also, and in a greater degree, in his translations, especially in that rendering of the Odyssey. It is not our business here to examine into the merits and demerits of Morris as a translator; but if it were, this is what we should say on his behalf. While admitting that now and again his diction is a little too Scandinavian to be in colour, we should point to Matthew Arnold’s dictum that in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, and then we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of diction to translate Homer. One Homeric quality only can any one translator secure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failure better than success in less ambitious efforts? To Chapman it was given to secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagerness—but what else? To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measure of the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picture—but what else? There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric qualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured for our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of _naïf_ wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator? And could it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiest moods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, the industrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ and ten thousand delightful verses besides? But can a writer be called _naïf_ who works in a diction belonging rather to a past age than to his own? Morris has proved that he could. Imagination is the basis upon which all other human faculties rest. In the deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we “fools of nature,” our imagination. What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow; what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance. And day by day is Science herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlet’s dictum, that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” By the aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule, the present only. But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, of a modern writer’s inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particular past period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to that period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti because of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake.