delight of his latest years, and the final masterpiece of his multiform production.
Soon after the publication of the first part of "The Earthly Paradise," Charles Cowden Clarke wrote to him a letter of warm and sympathetic praise. "Your intimacy with Chaucer especially," he said, "riveted me the moment I felt your appeal; and I am sure that you would not have had a more devoted admirer, and Brother in the faith of Love and Beauty, than in my beloved friend and schoolfellow, John Keats, whom I all but taught his letters." In his reply, Morris speaks of "Keats, for whom I have such boundless admiration, and whom I venture to call one of my masters." It will be easily recognized that while the world which he elected to make his own was largely that of Chaucer, his poetical affinities were with Keats more than with any other poet.
The beginning of Morris's Icelandic studies can be definitely fixed in this year. It coincides with what might be called the final extinction of Rossetti's influence over him as an artist, and the gradual loosening which followed of the closer intimacy between them, though for several years more they still saw much of each other, and for three years, from 1871 to 1874, had a country house in common. The autumn holiday of 1868 was spent by the Morrises at Southwold—a memory of it is in the lovely introductory stanzas for October in "The Earthly Paradise"—and on his return to London he plunged into the study of Icelandic under the guidance of Mr. Magnússon. Till then he had known little of the subject at first hand; Dasent's "Burnt Njal" and "Gisli" were familiar to him, and of the other Sagas he had some general knowledge. Now he began their systematic study. The first Icelandic book he read with Magnússon was the
