the world of mediæval and classic story became less and less mere material for his poetry and more and more the actual place of his habitation. No poet has ever so utterly projected himself into another age as did Morris. Much has been written to show that Morris of _The Earthly Paradise_ and Morris of the political platform were one and the same person, and the doctrine cannot be lightly dismissed. But in a sense Sigurd and Jason and Gudrun and Atalanta were more vividly and intimately his fellows than the chairman and committee and the men and women of his audience. Though he did not tell them so exactly in so many words, his real ambition in going on to the political platform at all was to persuade these men and women that the Sigurds and the Atalantas were really the best company in all the world, and there willingly for their delight if they would but know them. And in moving among these people of a golden age (these people, that is to say, as recorded by the old poets, Chaucer and the _troubadours_ and _trouvères_) Morris not only steeped himself in their physical and spiritual life, he very largely caught and re-created the very manner of their expression. He did something in the diction of his poetry that had never before and is never likely again to be attempted successfully, he made an archaic idiom a living, personal, and original thing. The complaint about “Wardour Street” diction that has sometimes been made against Morris is stupid and indefensible. His poetic style may not please us in all moods, but when we are prepared for it we see that, unlikely as was his method to bring about such an event by the light of experience, it is as purely and individually a style as any poet’s, and that he has borrowed nothing without transmuting it to the strict degree of his obligation. When he follows Chaucer’s example and speaks of the brown bird, or the grey sky, or the bright flowers, and leaves it at that, we find ourselves accepting the image as complete, so naturally does he adopt the accent of a fourteenth-century poet and so far do we seem from the nineteenth century merely imitating the fourteenth. And the whole of his diction is radically modified by this circumstance, thus-- Ah! let me turn the page, nor chronicle In many words the death of faith, or tell Of meetings by the newly-risen moon, Of passionate silence, ’midst the brown birds’ tune, Of wild tears wept within the noontide shade, Of wild vows spoken that of old were made For other ears, when, amidst other flowers, He wandered through the love-begetting hours.... At last Into an open space she passed, Nigh filled with a wide, shallow lake; Amidmost which the fowl did take Their pastime. And even when his immediate concern, as in _The Message of the March Wind_, is with the life of an age that is his own by accident as it were, the manner still prevails--