Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/294

268 268 THE FIRST MORRIS hands through the darkness for protection. They touched responsive fingers, frailest of support — but the touch sufficed. Like a child soothed by the touch, he turned contentedly to sleep — I am old and have seen Many things that have been ; Both grief and peace And wane and increase. No fate I tell Of ill or well, But this I say : Night treadeth on day, And for worst and best — Right good is rest. Yes — there is much to be said for this conception of a twofold Morris, one side of him terrified by the twilight paths that tempted the other; it explains, for one thing, that queer passion of his for Iceland which perplexed Burne-Jones and Rossetti so sorely, but which yielded him his second masterpiece, Sigurd. For in that land of mingled noon and night, of snow- fields and secret fires, of monstrous dreams and dread imaginings united quite simply with the innocent ways of a pastoral people, he found the perfect re- sponding paradox to the contradictions of his own nature and could give his entire genius full play. The sunny Saxon craving, on the one hand, for feasting and stout blows and Socialism and big blue- eyed men with golden beards ; and the furtive but perhaps profounder longing, on the other hand, for twilit moods and wizard kingdoms, somewhere away west of the moon, beyond the forbidden draw- bridges of dream — both found in Sigurd a simultaneous solace. All the strands of his various nature come together in that gigantic poem and are twisted in one everlasting knot.