In this poem, too, we find the isolated instances wherein Morris makes some allusion to the desire for seeing beyond the veils of our existence, some suggestion of the hope of spring when leaves are falling. Even here there is none of the exultant certainty of the Ode to the West Wind, but a quiet fearlessness that is no less inspiring and consoling in its way—
Live on, for Love liveth, and earth shall be shaken
By the wind of his wings on the triumphing morning,
When the dead and their deeds that die not shall awaken,
And the world's tale shall sound in your trumpet of warning,
And the sun smite the banner called Scorn of the Scorning,
And dead pain ye shall trample, dead fruitless desire,
As ye wend to pluck out the new world from the fire.
And again—
In what wise, ah, in what wise shall it be?
How shall the bark that girds the winter tree
Babble about the sap that sleeps beneath,
And tell the fashion of its life and death?
How shall my tongue in speech man's longing wrought
Tell of the things whereof he knoweth nought?
Should I essay it might ye understand
How those I love shall share my promised land!
Then must I speak of little things as great,
Then must I tell of love and call it hate,
Then must I bid you seek what all men shun,
Reward defeat, praise deeds that were not done.
The Emperor and Empress who watch the play point its moral for themselves, and their somewhat remote humanity serves admirably as a step between the pure poetry of the central action and the homespun reality of Giles and Joan. They send gifts to the actors of Pharamond and Azalais, and then the Emperor—
Fain had I been
To see him face to face and his fair Queen,
And thank him friendly, asking him maybe
How the world looks to one with love set free;
It may not be, for as thine eyes say, sweet,
Few folk as friends shall unfreed Pharamond meet.
So is it: we are lonelier than those twain,
Though from their vale they ne'er depart again.
But Giles and his wife are under no such restraint of state; they will bid the players to their home and be their scholars for a while
In many a lesson of sweet lore
To learn love's meaning more and more,
and the scene between the two peasants that ends the play is an idyll full of the simple fragrance and humanity and earth-love that were the crowning splendours of Jason and The Earthly Paradise.
In 1869 the poet had published his translation of the Grettir Saga, carried out in collaboration with Eiríkr Magnússon, and this was followed in the next year by the Völsunga Saga from the same hands. Morris's feeling for the northern stories had already found expression in more than one of the tales in The Earthly Paradise, notably 'The Lovers of Gudrun,' and the Icelandic visit of 1871 was followed by a second in 1873. In 1875 he published Three Northern Love Stories, translations of extraordinary directness and conviction, and these six years of study of and service to the curiously neglected story of the northern race were now approaching their culminating triumph. To examine these various preliminary essays in detail here is neither possible nor necessary. The journals of the travel in Iceland, written as they were without any definite purpose of publication, show how intensely he was moved by the spirit of the Sagas, how close his own being was to it. Every stone was quick with a tradition that meant for him the very breath of splendid and heroic life. His feeling for the earth was at all times, as we have seen, one of an almost indefinable tenderness and yearning, but once he had seen Iceland it was the earth that nourished Sigurd and Brynhild and Gunnar and Gudrun that was thenceforth most deeply rooted in his love. The austere beauty and gloomy strength of the Icelandic countryside were from that time sacred things in his imagination, and it was, perhaps, not without taking thought that in the first poem that he wrote on his return he made Pharamond, when trying to recall the country to which he must again turn to find the end of his seeking, say that