Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/315

THE FIRST MORRIS 289 All the traceable epithets and idioms, the clinging cadences and lucky turns of speech, that twined round the original image, seeming an essential part of its tissue, tumbled off as he tore it away. He retained nothing but the visible object, brushed clear of all the music that conjured it : the poem was melted down and carried off as virgin vision. That very casement of Madeline's, one now recollects, was actually one of the objects he utilized. The coloured light that splashes these pages of Guenevere drew much of its splendour from those dyes : yet in all that stanza of Keats there is not one cardinal word that Morris himself ever used. He thrust through the writing to the solid substance itself, to the gules and the traceried stone — stacked these in the Aladdin's cave of his memory, a pirate's hoard of similar loot, where the solid residuum of all the world's romances — Gothic, Arabian, Norse — lay stored indistinguishably with sense-impressions gathered in Essex and Oxford and Bruges — figures from missals, designs from old Herbals, faces from smooth Flemish portraits, carvings and colours from stained church windows and tombs ; and then, when the time came to use it, sat down before it, wedged where it lay, and to the mechanical beat of some simple borrowed metre, set ticking at his elbow like a metronome, strung his monosyllables stolidly to- gether, one by one, like a man making a copy in mosaic, till he had mapped the carven casement out afresh : — Because it seemed a dwelling for a queen, No belfry for the swinging of great bells, No bolt or stone that ever crush'd the green Shafts, amber and rose walls, no soot that tells Of the Norse torches burning up the roofs On the flower-carven marble could I see. . . . Mm of Ltttera. 20