Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/734

ÆT. 61] with the Guardians' election, getting eight out of twelve."

At the beginning of 1895 Morris was carrying on all his multifarious occupations with unimpaired activity. Two presses were at work upon the Chaucer, and a third on smaller books. He was designing new paper-hangings; he was going on daily with the writing of new romances; he was completing, in collaboration with Mr. Magnusson, the translation of the Heimskringla which they had begun some three and twenty years before, and seeing it through the press for the Saga Library; and he was busily increasing the collection of illuminated manuscripts, chiefly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which towards the end of his life became his chief treasures and gave him extraordinary delight. With the two presses at work it now seemed possible to finish the Chaucer in a year, and the panics into which he sometimes fell over its slow progress were greatly allayed. Among the smaller books which the third printing-press was turning out was the volume of selected poems of Coleridge. As to that book the following interesting passage occurs in a letter to Ellis when the contents were under discussion:

"As to the Coleridge-Keats question, you don't quite understand the position I think. Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded: we don't want to make a selection of his works. Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician, who by some strange freak of fortune turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. It is these real poems only that must be selected, or we burden the world with another useless book. Christabel only just comes in because the detail is fine; but nothing a hair's breadth worse must be admitted. There is absolutely no difficulty in choosing, because the