Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/290

264 264 THE FIRST MORRIS mere tuneless intonation. Nor is it any tale that delights us ; nor a useful text ; nor the prettiness of conceit. As the green and crimson figures crowd about us, the verse that brings them is wholly forgotten. It is by the movement of these painted characters, a code superior to language, that the unspeakable message is made clear. We have crossed the bridges that divide symbol from reality and know that they have dissolved as we passed. We are absorbed into the very stuff of metaphor, and inhabit a wisdom above words. The elusive magic that verse has hitherto practised capri- ciously, the spell that floats from a lyrical cry or gleams in a solitary phrase, has here been caught up and sustained and built unalloyed into an enduring substance. Poetry at last has justified our instinc- tive faith in her and fulfilled her undefined pledge ; now at last we enter, with Blake, into " Noah's rainbow, and become the friends and companions of the images of wonder. . . ." Ill And then — the spell snaps. To turn the last page of Guenevere is to let the little lever slip back — Click ! — out we slide, irretrievably, into the old, placid, amiable sunlight and the reassuring conven- tions. It is a recoil as complete as from moonlight to noonlight — from the lovely delirium of fever to the cool languors of convalescence ; it is one of the most astonishing zigzags in letters. With Guenevere we seemed to have crossed the "perilous seas," to have pierced their foam finally; with Jason, Morris's next book, we are back on the safe, hither side of them, the ripe, comforting earth, with its fruits and its fatness, banked between us and all questionable things : —