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 under the same roof with his workshops, in Queen Square, Bloomsbury.

During the five years (1860-5) at Red House, poetry had been almost laid aside in the pressure of other occupation. The unfinished drafts of a cycle of lyrico-drainatic poems called 'Scenes from the Fall of Troy' are the only surviving product of that period. But on his return to London he resumed the writing of poetry in a completely new manner and with extraordinary copiousness. The general scheme of the 'Earthly Paradise' had been already framed by him ; and in 1866 he began the composition of a series of narrative poems for this work, which he continued for about four years to pour forth incessantly. One of the earliest written, the 'Story of the Golden Fleece,' outgrew its limits so much that it became a substantive epic of over ten thousand lines. It was separately published, under the title of 'The Life and Death of Jason,' in June 1867, and gave Morris a recognised position in the foremost rank of modern poets. The three volumes of the 'Earthly Paradise,' successively published in 1868-70, contained twenty-five more narrative poems, connected with one another by a framework of intricate skill and singular fitness and beauty. Several more are still extant in manuscript, and others again were destroyed by their author ; but those actually published (including the 'Jason') extend to over fifty thousand lines. In this fluent copiousness of narration, as well as in choice and use of metres, and in other subtler qualities, Morris went for his model to Chaucer, whom he professed as his chief master in poetry.

This torrent of production did not lead him to slacken in his work as a decorative manufacturer, to which at the beginning of 1870 he began to add that of producing illuminated manuscripts on paper and vellum, executed in many different styles, but all of unapproached beauty among modern work. About the same time he had made his first acquaintance with the Icelandic Sagas in the original, and begun to translate them into English. One of these translations, that of the 'Volsuuga-saga,' was published under the joint names of Morris and his Icelandic tutor, E. Magnusson, in May 1870. In the previous month he had sat to Watts for the portrait, now presented by the painter to the National Portrait Gallery, which represents Morris at the prime of his vigour and the height of his powers.

The completion of the 'Earthly Paradise' was followed by a pause in Morris's poetical activity. In the summer of 1871 he made a journey through Iceland, the effects of which upon his mind may be traced in much of his later work. In the same year he acquired what became his permanent country home, Kelmscott Manor House, a small but very beautiful and wholly undisfigured building of the early seventeenth century on the banks of the Thames near Lechlade. Round this house that 'love of the earth and worship of it,' which was his deepest instinct, centred for all the rest of his life.

For several years about this time there may be traced in all Morris's work a restlessness due to the constant search after fresh methods of artistic expression, and the growing feeling that, inasmuch as true art is coextensive with life, the true practice of art involves at every point questions belonging to the province of moral, social, and political doctrine. A prose novel of modern English life, begun in the spring of 1871 and never completed, was one of these essays in fresh methods. Another was the poem of 'Love is Enough,' begun after Morris's return from Iceland, and published at the end of 1872 : a singular and imperfectly successful attempt to revive, under modern conditions, the dramatic method of the later middle ages, and the Middle-English alliterative verse which had been driven out of use by foreign metres in the fifteenth century. For the next two years his leisure was mainly occupied by work as a scribe and illuminator ; to this period belong, among other works, the two exquisite manuscripts of Fitzgerald's 'Omar Khayyam' belonging to Lady Burne-Jones and Mrs. J. F. Homer. Towards the end of 1874 the dissolution of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co. became necessary for various reasons, and questions which arose as to the claims of the outgoing partners led to a period of much difficulty and trouble. The effect on Morris after the first shock was a bracing one ; and if the first period of his life had ended with the completion of the 'Earthly Paradise,' a second now opened which, without the irrecoverable romance of youth, was as copious in achievement upon a much wider field.

The first products of this new period were in literature. He had been for some time engaged in the production of a magnificent folio manuscript of the 'Æneid,' and in the course of that work had begun to translate the poem into English verse. The manuscript was finally laid aside for the translation, and the 'Æneids of Virgil' was published in November 1875. It had been preceded earlier in the year by a volume of translations from the Icelandic under the title of 'Three Northern Love Stories,' and was followed almost at once by the com-