Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/664

ÆT. 57] supernatural element was not indeed excluded, but in which it bore such a subordinate place as involved no violent strain on probability. Here the imagined world is of no place or time, and is one in which nothing is impossible. The dreamer of dreams has returned to that strange Land East of the Sun, mingled of Northern Saga and Arabian tale, through which the Star-Gazer had passed two and twenty years before in the days of "The Earthly Paradise": a land in which, like Odysseus and his comrades in the isle of Circe, "we do not know where is the dusk nor where the dawn." The book which the King's daughter shows to Hallblithe in his dream on the Acre of the Undying is a sort of figure of that glittering world, rich with all imagined and unimaginable wonders, into which Morris had entered long ago, and the door of which always remained open to him.

"She had in her hand a book covered outside with gold and gems, even as he saw it in the orchard-close aforetime: and he beheld her face that it was no longer the face of one sick with sorrow; but glad, and clear, and most beauteous. Now she opened the book and held it before Hallblithe and turned the leaves so that he might see them clearly; and therein were woods and castles painted, and burning mountains, and the wall of the world, and kings upon their thrones, and fair women and warriors, all most lovely to behold, even as he had seen it aforetime in the orchard when he lay lurking amidst the leaves of the bay tree.

"So at last she came to the place in the book wherein was painted Hallblithe's own image over against the image of the Hostage; and he looked thereon and longed. But she turned the leaf, and lo! on one side the Hostage again, standing in a fair garden of the spring with the lilies all about her feet, and behind