Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1896-10-09
Death of william Morris, the English
Poet.


VIM. Morris, the English poet, died Sat-
urday, aged 62. He was intimately asso-
ciated with many of the great men and
women who fought the hard fight with
tradition, and who rescued the arts of poe
try and painting from the slavery to which
they had been reduced in the land whose
boast it is that the slave who breathes the
air of England becomes a free man. Mr..
Morris was the son of a wealthy merchant
and inherited large fortune. The artis-
tic temperament was predominant in him
and it moved him in many widely different
directions. After taking his degree at Ok
ford he studied painting and then architec-
ture.
In 1858 he published small volume of
poems. 1t included the since well-known
defense of Guenevere," but at the time
the book attracted little attention. There
were a few appreciative readers, and Nor
ris felt that at last he had found the prop
er means OF expression.
Since then book has followed book in
quick succession, and Morris's reputation
has steadily grown as poet whose SINGER
ity was indubitable, whose force could not
be denied, and whose powers of expression
raised him high in the second flight of
singers. Prominent among his books are
1.-THE life and death of Jason,' "The
earthly paradise" "The Kneids of Vir-
gill;" and 1.-The story of Sigurd the Vol
sung and the fall of the Niblungs.n These
all appeared before 1877. He also did
much work as translator, and had large
interests in decorative pottery and tapes
try concerns.
In recent years Morris has gained a new
celebrity as an impassioned socialist, and
his lectures and writings on economic sub
jects have attracted much attention. 1t
was as a would-be social reformer that
Morris awakened harsh criticism. The
British public could not accept even as a
poet the man who boldly and fiercely at
tackled private ownership as theft, who de-
nounced marriage as an anachronism, and
the family as an absurdity. The British
public, too, could not understand how Nor
ris, himself millionaire capitalist and
large employer of labor, could, year after
year, make addresses TO workingmen in the
parks and streets of London that were full
of passionate eulogies of coming social
revolution, and of vehement denunciations
of existing economic conditions. After the
death of Tennyson there was talk of ap-
Swinburne, William Watson, and he were
obviously the three men most worthy, so
far as poetic achievement and capacity
went, to receive any honor the English
government could pay to literature. Other
considerations, however, prevailed. The
ridiculous Austin won the prize of official
recognition, and has since disgraced the
name of poet by writing three or four of
the most miserable and tawdry pieces of
versi6cation to be found in the English
language.
The Boston Transcript gives this appre-
ciatiVe estimate of Morris's career: Will
liam Morris was undoubtedly the most ex-
traordinary and influential figure in the
art life of modern England. Poet paint
er, printer, amateur of true living in the
highest rank of the higher socialism, deco
rator, maker of tapestries, man of enor-
nous versatility and virility in life and art,
with fine faculty for fine friendship, Will
liam Morris fulfilled, nobly and amply,
constantly astonishing even those who
knew him best, the measure of man Of
genius