We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate moral discrimination--a single case in which the moral note has been struck, in which the idea betrays the smallest acquaintance with the conscience. The moral realm for Mr. Swinburne is simply a brilliant chiaroscuro of costume and posture. This makes all Mr. Swinburne's magnificent talk about Victor Hugo's great criminals and monstrosities, about Shelley's Count Cenci, and Browning's Guido Franchesini, and about dramatic figures generally, quite worthless as anything but amusing fantasy. As psychology it is, to our sense, extremely puerile; for we do not mean simply to say that the author does not understand morality--a charge to which he would be probably quite indifferent; but that he does not at all understand immorality. Such a passage as his rhapsody upon Victor Hugo's Josiane ("such a pantheress may be such a poetess," etc.) means absolutely nothing. It is entertaining as pictorial writing--though even in this respect as we have said, thanks to excess and redundancy, it is the picturesque spoiled rather than achieved; but as an attempt at serious analysis it seems to us, like many of its companions, simply ghastly--ghastly in its poverty of insight and its pretension to make mere lurid imagery do duty as thought. THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS I. A review of _The Life and Death of Jason_: A poem. By William Morris, Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1867. Originally published in _North American Review_, October, 1867. II. A review of _The Earthly Paradise_: A poem. By William Morris, Boston: Roberts Bros. 1868. Originally published in _The Nation_, July 9, 1868. _The Earthly Paradise; Parts I and II_ as originally published in London by F. S. Ellis in 1868, is in one volume, and was issued the same year in Boston by Roberts Brothers. Parts III and IV were issued as volumes II and III under the same title, in London in 1870, and in Boston in 1870-71. THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS I. THE LIFE AND DEATH Of JASON In this poetical history of the fortunate--the unfortunate--Jason, Mr. Morris has written a book of real value. It is some time since we have met with a work of imagination of so thoroughly satisfactory a character,--a work read with an enjoyment so unalloyed and so untempered by the desire to protest and to criticise. The poetical firmament within these recent years has been all alive with unprophesied comets and meteors, many of them of extraordinary brilliancy, but most of them very rapid in their passage. Mr. Morris gives us the comfort of feeling that he is a fixed star, and that his radiance is not likely to be extinguished in a draught of wind,--after the fashion of Mr. Alexander Smith, Mr. Swinburne and Miss Ingelow.