XVIII

"Enough!" I return'd, "let the dead decide:
And whose-soever the portrait prove,

His shall it be, when the cause is tried,
Where Death is arraign'd by Love."

XIX

We found the portrait, there in its place:
We open'd it by the tapers' shine:
The gems were all unchanged: the face
Was-neither his nor mine.

XX

"One nail drives out another, at least! The portrait is not ours," I cried,

"But our friend's, the Raphael-faced young Priest, Who confess'd her when she died."

SPRING AND WINTER

I

Was it well in him, if he

Felt not love, to speak of love so?

If he still unmoved must be,

Was it nobly sought to move so?
Pluck the flower, but not to wear it-
Spurn it from him, yet not spare it?

II

Need he say that I was fair,
With such meaning in his tone,
Adding ever that her hair

Had the same tinge as my own?
Pluck my life up, root and bloom,
To make garlands for her tomb!

III

And, her cheek, he said, tho' bright.

Lack'd the lucid blush divine Of that rose each whisper light

Of his praises waked in mine; But 'twas just that he loved then More than he can love again.

IV

Then, if beauty could not bind him,
Wherefore praise me, speaking low?
Use my face just to remind him

How no face could please him now?
Why, if loving could not move him,
Did he teach me still to love him?

V

"Yes!" he said, "he had grown wise now: He had suffer'd much of yore:

But a fair face, to his eyes now,

Was a fair face, and no more.

Yet the anguish and the bliss,
And the dream too, had been his."

VI

Ah, those words a thought too tender
For the commonplaces spoken!
Looks whose meaning seem'd to render

Help to words when speech came broken!

Why so late in July moonlight

Just to say what 's said by noonlight?

VII

And why praise my youth for gladness,
Keeping something in his smile
That changed all my youth to sadness,
He still smiling all the while?
Since, when so my youth was over,
He said "Seek some younger lover!"

VIII

Well, the Spring 's back now! the thrushes
Are astir as heretofore,

And the apple-blossom blushes

As of old about the door.
Doth he taste a finer bliss,

I must wonder, in all this,

IX

(Winning thus what I have lost)
By the usage of my youth?
I can feel my forehead crost

By the wrinkle's fretful tooth,
While the grey grows in my hair,
And the cold creeps everywhere.

ATHENS

(1865)

[From After Paradise]

The burnt-out heart of Hellas here behold! Quench'd fire-pit of the quick explosive Past, Thought's highest crater-all its fervours cold, Ashes and dust at last!

And what Hellenic light is living now

To gild, not Greece, but other lands, is given: Not where the splendour sank, the after-glow Of sunset stays in heaven.

But loud o'er Grecian ruins still the lark
Doth, as of old, Hyperion's glory hail,
And from Hymettus, in the moonlight, hark
The exuberant nightingale!

ANDROMEDA

I

The monster that with menace guarded thee Rock-bound, unhappy one, at last is slain; And thy long-prisoned loveliness set free

From the chill torment of its cruel chain. For what, then, do those wistful gazes wait? And why art thou still lingering there alone, In fruitless freedom, so disconsolate?

Perseus is gone!

II

Heroic men, 'tis yours to dare and do.
Heroic women, yours the harder lot,
To wait and suffer. The years come and go.
Deliverance tarries. You can seek it not.
And if, when come at last, it comes too late?
Forlorn Andromeda, thy chains undone
Have freed thy life for what uncertain fate?
Perseus is gone!

WILLIAM MORRIS

[WILLIAM MORRIS was born at Elm House, Walthamstow, in 1834, went to school at Marlborough, and proceeded from it to Exeter College, Oxford. On taking his degree he became an articled pupil of G. E. Street, the architect, but quitted his office before long in order to devote himself to painting, designing, and decoration, as well as to poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, founded and carried on by him and a group of his friends, in 1856; and, his first published volume, The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems, in 1858. For some years afterwards he was chiefly occupied with the work which developed round the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (afterwards Morris & Co.), manufacturers and decorators. In 1865 he returned to London from the house he had built and furnished for himself in Kent, and resumed the writing of poetry. The Life and Death of Jason appeared in 1867, and The Earthly Paradise in 1868-1870. During these years he had learned Icelandic, and translated a number of the Sagas. In 1871 he became tenant of Kelmscott Manor House, Lechlade, which remained his country home for the rest of his life, though he chiefly lived and worked in London. Love is Enough was published in 1872 and Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs in 1876. In 1877 he declined to accept nomination for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford; about this time his political activity began, at first as an advanced Radical, gradually developing into the active Socialism of his later years. On January 13, 1883, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Exeter and enrolled himself as a member of the Social Democratic Federation. From that time forward the chief among his multifarious occupations were, designing for and carrying on the business of his firm, organizing and working on behalf of the Socialist movement, lecturing and writing on art and social questions, writing prose romances, and carrying on the work of the famous Kelmscott Press, started by him in 1891. In this last year he brought out, as the second volume printed at that press, a selection of his own unpublished poems under the title of Poems by the Way. Among his poetical works should also be mentioned his verse translations of Virgil's Aeneid (1875) and Homer's Odyssey (1887). He died at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, in October, 1896.]