Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/330

ÆT. 40] and heavily charged rhetoric, was quite alien from all Morris's sympathies. Though, as he says in this letter, he was a non-musical man, the older music, the church music of the Middle Ages and that of the great English and Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, appealed to him very deeply. Music was a thing that, on the whole, he put away from him as not belonging to his work; but from the early days of his singing plain-song at Oxford till, in the weakness of his last illness, he broke to tears over a few snatches of virginal-music, it was from no want of sensitiveness—rather perhaps the reverse—that he would not admit it into his life.

He was now preparing the volume of translations, new and older, from the Icelandic, which, for some forgotten reason, was not published till 1875. Of its contents he writes again to Mr. Forman, on the 8th of December:

"I would have answered your letter before (many thanks for it) but I had not quite made up my mind about the Stories in my translation book. It stands thus now as I intended at first: the Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue, printed in the Fortnightly some years back; the Story of Frithiof the Bold, printed before in the Dark Blue; the story of Viglund the Fair, never before printed: these 'three Northern Love Stories' will give the name to the book, but to thicken it out I add three more short tales; Hroi the Fool, Hogni and Hedin, and Thorstein Staff-smitten; the first of these three a pretty edition of a 'sharper' story and the same as a tale in the Arabian Nights. The second a terrible story; a very well told, but late version of a dark and strange legend of remote times. The third simple, and not without generosity, smelling strong of the soil of Iceland, like the Gunnlaug."