The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by, And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie, As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong. Or the end of “Thunder in the Garden”-- Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown: In the trees the wind westering moved; Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown, And in the dark house was I loved. There is a humanity of this world and moment in Morris’s feeling for Nature with which no other poet’s except Whitman’s can be compared. Except in the greatest--the unaccomplished things--in “Leaves of Grass” there is no earth-feeling in the literature of our language so majestic and yet so tender as in “The Message of the March Wind.” With him poetry was not, as it has tended more and more to be in recent times, a matter as exclusive as a caste. He was not half-angel or half-bird, but a man on close terms with life and toil, with the actual, troublous life of every day, with toil of the hands and brain together; in short, a many-sided citizen. He was one whom Skarphedin the son of Njal of Bergthorsknoll would not have disdained, and when he spoke he seemed indignant at the feebleness of words, one that should have used a sword and might have lamented with the still later poet-- The Spirit stands and looks on infamy, And unashamed the faces of the pit Snarl at their enemy; Finding him wield no insupportable light, And no whirled edge of blaze to hit Backward their impudence, and hammer them to flight; Although ready is he, Wearing the same righteous steel Upon his limbs, helmed as he was then When he made olden war; Yet cannot now with foulness fiercely deal. There is no indignation among men, The Spirit has no scimitar Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword, Into the Spirit’s hands? That he may be a captain of the Lord Again, and mow out of our lands The crop of wicked men.... O for that anger in the hands Of Spirit! To us, O righteous sword, Come thou and clear our lands, O fire, O indignation of the Lord![2] [2] From _Poems and Interludes_, by Lascelles Abercrombie.