Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/682

ÆT. 58] 1871 and 1873, is remarkable as the single instance in which Morris, after the first enthusiasm of his early years in London had cooled, has distinctly imitated the manner and versification of Rossetti.

"The title of my new book," Morris wrote to his publishers in June, "will be Poems by the Way; the format the same as the Glittering Plain. It will be printed in red and black. The poems will include some recently written and some written many years ago. Some have appeared in magazines, but with the two exceptions of a little piece out of the Jason and one out of the Ogier, they will none of them have been printed in any book of mine."

The "little piece out of the Jason" is the one just mentioned; that from "Ogier the Dane," which was in the end not included, was one of the versions of the song beginning in the white-flowered hawthorn brake, in that poem. These two lyrics are, in the opinion of many judges, the most beautiful of all he ever wrote, and both are among the rare instances of lyrics which remained for years in his mind, and which he remodelled or retouched again and again. Two earlier versions of this latter piece are extant: its original form, as a lyric in the "Scenes from the Fall of Troy," has been already quoted. An intermediate version occurs in the cancelled and rewritten Prologue to "The Earthly Paradise." Whether the lyric which he proposed to insert in the new volume was one of these two earlier versions, or (as in the case of the lyric from "Jason") a later version than that already published, and in that case a fourth version of the same piece, there are now no means of discovering.

In this pleasant work, and in the active joy of returning health, the spring and summer passed easily