Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/309

288 scheme of colour, and showing, although each is only slightly over four inches by two in size, his finest qualities of design and invention. The floral decoration which runs down the margins and between the verses is in pale colours, green, blue, yellow, pink, and crimson, with a preponderance of green. The initial letters of the lines are alternated in gold and colours, the page always beginning with a gold letter, and one colour being used down each page. The pictures are inclosed in gold frames, unburnished; and on the pages with pictures and those facing them the whole of the illumination is enriched with burnished gold throughout. This book was given by Burne-Jones to Miss Frances Graham (Mrs. J.F. Horner), and is now in her possession.

Immediately after his return from Iceland, Morris had also begun the composition of a new poem, with the origination and completion of which his work as an illuminator is intimately connected. "Morris has been here twice since his return," Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott from Kelmscott on the 2nd of October, "for a few days at first and just now for a week again. He is now back in London, and this place will be empty of all inmates by the end of this week, I think. Morris has set to work with a will on a sort of masque called 'Love is Enough,' which he means to print as a moderate quarto, with woodcuts by Ned Jones and borders by himself, some of which he has done really very beautifully. The poem is, I think, at a higher point of execution perhaps than anything that he has done, having a passionate lyric quality such as one found in his earliest work, and of course much more mature balance in carrying out. It will be a very fine work."

The poem in its first form was finished by the be-