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;