Morris at a single stroke seemed to restore the legend to its historical place, and to recapture a part of its passionate significance. I confess that no later work of his has ever affected me to the same degree, though there runs in them all that exquisite and ineffable charm of the born story-teller. In poetry as in fiction there are, and have always been, two competing schools of thought, the one moved by the love of the story to be told, and the other primarily attracted to the story by the opportunities it may offer for the presentment of an ethical idea, or the interpretation of individual character. They may both reach the same goal, but there remains that contrast in the quality of the workmanship which is born of its different origin. I remember Morris saying to me once that he did not much care for a story unless it was long, and although the statement perhaps was not intended to be taken literally, it bore witness to that element in his genius which led him to bury himself with unwearied delight in every smallest detail of the tale he had chosen to tell. Morris, I think, was not easy to know well. There was a certain rough shyness in his manner that kept him aloof from the initial advances of ordinary acquaintance, and it was only as an acquaintance that I knew him. But he must have had deeply lovable qualities to have become so endeared, as he was, to Burne-Jones. It was their custom for years to spend every Sunday morning together in Burne-Jones’s studio; and on the many occasions when Burne-Jones has spoken to me of him, I can recall no word of abatement from the deep and lasting affection in which he held his life-long friend. The influence wielded by Mr. Swinburne over the younger men of his generation was of a widely different kind. That new music of which I have spoken, already announced in the _Atalanta_, and presented with even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the Poems and Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in its fullest sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and his inexhaustible invention of new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that had gone before was not the mere preface to this final achievement. The immediate effect of the fluent melodies he could command was for the time, at least, to put earlier masters upon their trial, and it was not until the overpowering glamour of these earlier poems had passed that it was possible to reckon at their true worth his lasting claims as a poet.