angel wings by contact with the sensual and the impure; but Morris
has never attempted to robe vice in beauty; and as has been well
remarked, his lays can bring to the cheek of purity no blush save
that of pleasure."

The following letter, from the pen of Grace Greenwood, is a lady's
tribute to the genius of the poet:--

"I have read of late, with renewed pleasure and higher appreciation,
the songs and ballads of our genial-hearted countryman, Morris. I
had previously worried myself by a course of rather dry reading,
and his poetry, tender, musical, fresh, and natural, came to me like
spring's first sunshine, the song of her first birds, the breath
of her first violets.

"What a contrast is this pleasant volume to the soul-racking "Festus,"
which has been one of my recent passions. That remarkable work
has passages of great beauty and power, linked in unnatural marriage
with much that is poor and weak. It is like a stately ruined
palace,


'Mingling its marble with the dust of Rome;'


or it is like its own fabled first temple built to God, in the
new earth--a multitude of gems, swallowed by an earthquake, and
scattered through a world of baser matter. The soul of the reader
now faints with excess of beauty, now shudders at the terrible and
the revolting. the young poet's muse at times goes like Proserpine