302 THE FIRST MORRIS poetry, for his own content, but to do it serenely he had to feel it was contenting other people too, that it was performing a soothing social service ; and he found this justification in the fancied power of verse to soften the harsh outlines of the only unearthly Power he was forced to admit into his mental kingdom — the Power, I mean, of Death.' His own childlike terror of Death was one of his most conspicuous traits ; and in poetry he pretended that he found a double panacea — a power to act, first as an opiate, soothing the fears of the living, and then as a preservative, embalming and renewing the dead. These were the duties he liked to feel The Earthly Paradise was fulfilling : of a lullaby drowning the dread approaching footsteps, and of a spell to recall the departed : — Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades ; Verse calls them forth ; 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids. Then, soothed by this sophistry, he could turn con- tentedly to his task and indulge himself still further. To have lashed himself, fought for a strange poignancy, struggled and burned in the throes of creative desire, would have been to have broken the precepts of his own kingdom absurdly ; to write smoothly and easily,
- " From the first he was afflicted by a pagan fear of death, or
rather by the feeling that death, sure to come at last and possible at any moment, made life seem meaningless. He writes of it, now and again in his poetry, like an animal cursed with foreknow- ledge ; it was a fact that he could neither explain nor forget. So there was always this dark shadow to the sunlight of his labours ; and, however easily he might live, he could not be at ease when he thought of dying." — Mr. A. Glutton-Brock in the latest and by far the best of the books about Morris's work, William Morris : His Work and Influence, published in the Home University Library (Is.), in June 1914.
