Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/366

ÆT. 43] Rossetti made on the dragon-transformation of Fafnir, as an element in the story which was not merely barbarous, but silly, he made a reply which can scarcely be quoted here, but which no one who has heard it is ever likely to forget. But he did not let the tepid welcome which "Sigurd" met with weigh on his spirits. Two months after its publication he writes from Leek, where he was again busy among his dye-vats and ordering three hundredweight of poplar-twigs for experiments in yellow dyeing (the colour they gave did not turn out sufficiently fast to satisfy him):

"My ill temper about the public was only a London mood and is quite passed now: and I think I have even forgotten what I myself have written about that most glorious of stories, and think about it all (and very often) as I did before I began my poem."

"I had been reading the Njala," this letter goes on, "in the original before I came here: it is better even than I remembered; the style most solemn (Dasent now and then uses a word too homely I think, which brings it down a little): all men's children in it, as always in the best of the northern stories, so venerable to each other, and so venerated: and the exceeding good temper of Gunnar amidst his heroism, and the calm of Njal: and I don't know anything more consoling or grander in all literature (to use a beastly French word) than Gunnar's singing in his house under the moon and the drifting clouds: or do you remember the portents at Bergthorsknoll before the burning, and how Skarphedinn takes them? or Skarphedinn's death; or how Flosi pays the penalty for the Burning, never appealing against the due and equal justice, but defending himself and his folk stoutly against it at every step. What a glorious outcome of the worship of Courage these stories are."

His position as a poet was in any case secure among