280 THE FIRST MORRIS unit by unit, until they were built into recognized shapes. All the delicious collusions of which words are capable — the soft cocoons they can spin, out of sound and association, until the legible, logical line has dis- appeared in a mist of gold — were qualities he never understood. It is curious to compare Morris's Portrait of My Lady (" My lady seems of ivory ") with Rossetti's companion-piece {A Portrait) : the first a patient catalogue of features, cut like a cameo, fitted together like the leaded panes of a window ; Rossetti's softly evading all outlines and junctures, sliding deliciously through graded elisions, using only the words that hover on the dusky verges of language — moth-like words, twilight words, words that bring dusk on their wings — all the gliding idiom of reverie : — In painting her I shrined her face 'Mid mystic trees where light falls in Hardly at all ; a covert place Where you might think to find a din Of doubtful talk, and a live flame Wandering, and many a shape whose name Not itself knoweth, and old dew, And your own footsteps meeting you. And all things going as they came. This is to make a whispering-gallery of verse, a corridor of stealing echoes and lost sighs. And even when they both enter the borderland of the ballads, where they might be thought to approach one another most nearly, the two men remain marvellously unalike. The bridge that would join Rapunzel and Rose Mary must leap a full kingdom of emotions. The Welshman's work is as Teutonic as black-letter ; as Gothic as a castle on the Rhine. The Italian's is as Celtic as a mountain stream : its stanzas slide as easily as strung opals, the picture mirrored in the heart of each has a magical purity, and yet when all is done, when the last has; slipped by, the legend
