victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.

I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the eighteen
of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to speak about three
living poets, in addition to those masters treated of in my last letter.
Two of the three you will have guessed at--Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William
Morris. The third, I dare say, you do not know even by name. I think he
is not one of the English eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges. His muse has
followed the epicurean maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, _fallentis
semita vitae_, where the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan
berries droop in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort. But you will
find her all the fresher for her country ways.

My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far away
that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I remember
sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St. Andrews, looking
across the bay to the sunset, while some one repeated "Two Red Roses
across the Moon." And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense.
With Mr. Morris's other early verses, "The Defence of Guinevere," this
song of the moon and the roses was published in 1858. Probably the
little book won no attention; it is not popular even now. Yet the lyrics
remain in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast
"Earthly Paradise," that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and
green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich
palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little
by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these
persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and
their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the
characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere" are people of
flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the