Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/217



analogy I have drawn in the last essay between the histoy and the causes of the rise of a new kind of poetry in Keats and now in Rossetti and Morris is, I have said, more clearly represented in Morris than in Rossetti. I have heard of persons, anxious to free Morris's youthful life from the charge of indifference to the problems of his day, who have culled out of his letters and talk at Oxford, and shortly after he left it, phrases which seem to represent that he was vitally interested in the questions which disturbed the world of England when he was young. It is true that he spoke of these questions when they turned up, or when a friend interested in them came from the noisy world without into the quietudes of Oxford; but by the time he wrote his first book of poetry, indeed, after that journey in France when he and Burne-Jones resolved to give up going into the Church, his indifference to the theological, political, philosophic, and social questions of the day had risen into boredom. He ignored them completely, and so did his friend, Burne-Jones. And Morris cried, like Keats—"My world is disenchanted. Where shall I find loveliness? Where does Beauty sleep? There is the healing of humanity;