Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/680

ÆT. 58] lished. Without the help of Mr. Fairfax Murray, into whose hands a number of the unpublished manuscripts had passed, and who had kept a record of all the poems which had ever been printed in magazines or elsewhere, the collection could hardly have been made. As it is, a number of his poems, which would have come within the general scope of the book, escaped his notice altogether. Apart from the longer narrative poems belonging to the period of "The Earthly Paradise," there are still sufficient of these yet unpublished pieces,—lyrics, sonnets, and ballads,—to make up a second volume of "Poems by the Way" as large as the first.

Among the pieces which had been rescued from total disappearance by Mr. Murray were a few belonging to the earliest years, the period of "The Defence of Guenevere." Of two of them he writes to Murray, "Catherine puzzles me: I have not the slightest recollection of any stanza of it. Did I write it? Is it a translation? I think not the latter; but it is devilish like. It is much too long, and I fear it is too rude to be altered. The Long Land I like in a fashion. But O the callowness of it! Item it is tainted with imitation of Browning, as Browning then was." None of these very early pieces were finally included in the volume published. The poem of "Goldilocks and Goldilocks," which concludes the volume, was the only one written for it now: the remainder of its contents, which are placed in a studied disarrangement, fall into two groups. One of these consists of poems written in the six or seven years between 1867 and 1874, the period which begins with "The Life and Death of Jason" and ends with "Love is Enough." The other is made up of poems of a period divided from the former by an interval of ten