the sick. Even in Mr. Morris's earliest poems snatches of the sweet
French tongue had always come with something of Hellenic blitheness
and grace. And now it is below the very coast of France, through the
fleet of Edward the Third, among the gaily painted medieval sails,
that we pass to a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divine
good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age.
There the stories of The Earthly Paradise are told, Greek story and
romantic alternating; and for the crew of the Rose Garland, coming
across the sins of the earlier world with the sign of the cross, and
drinking Rhine-wine in Greece, the two worlds of sentiment are
confronted.

[227] One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry
has, which is on its surface--the continual suggestion, pensive or
passionate, of the shortness of life. This is contrasted with the
bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it--the sense of death
and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense
of death. But that complexion of sentiment is at its height in
another "aesthetic" poet of whom I have to speak next, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.

1868.

NOTES

213. +This essay appeared only in the 1889 edition of Appreciations.

219. *Fauriel's Histoire de la Poesie Provencale, tome ii. ch. xviii.