Morris, WILLIAM, was born at Walthamstow, 24th March 1834, and educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford, where he formed a lasting friendship with Burne-Jones, the famous painter. He himself studied to be a painter, but without success, his artistic temperament being destined to have play in another direction. In 1858 he published a small volume entitled The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems, which passed almost unnoticed at the time; but in 1867 he won the attention and admiration of every true lover of poetry by a long narrative poem entitled The Life and Death of Jason. The Earthly Paradise (3 vols. 1868-70) confirmed his high reputation. This work is made up of twenty-four legendary and romantic poems of classic or of Gothic origin, recited by Norwegian seamen who had sailed westward to find the earthly paradise. Other works were Love is Enough (1873), the Aeneid of Virgil done into English verse (1876), Sigurd the Volsung (1876—his own favourite amongst his poems), and The Fall of the Niblungs, a Poem (1877). His translation of the Odyssey (1887) is more successful than his Aeneid. In collaboration with Mr Eirik Magnusson he translated from the
Icelandic Grettir the Strong, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, and Three Northern Love Stories. The House of the Wolfings (1889) was in prose; as was also The Roots of the Mountains (1890), a fine story of primitive Northern life, in artificially archaic language, afterwards much affected by him. The Glittering Plain and News from Nowhere (1891)—a utopian romance—followed, and in the same year Poems by the Way, his last volume of original verse. Later were The Wood beyond the World (1895), Child Christopher (1895)—a variant of 'Havelock the Dane,' a verse translation of Beowulf (1895), and The Well at the World's End (1896). In 1863 Mr Morris and others founded the establishment for the manufacture of wall-papers, stained glass, tiles and artistic household decorations, which has largely contributed to reform English taste in colour and design (the article on painted or stained glass, Vol. V. p. 246, is by him). Latterly a pronounced socialist, fervid in his sympathy with the poor, but by no means systematic in his theory, he wrote and lectured much in support of his views, and edited and wrote for the Commonweal. Hopes and Fears for Art (1892) were lectures. In his later years much of his energy was devoted to the Kelmscott Press, founded by him, which in 1891-96 published in special typography and with beautiful adornments a series of some fifty works, including translations of mediæval French romances, Shelly, Keats, Rossetti, Herrick, parts of Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Swinburne, his own Beowulf and some other poems, and finally a magnificent Chaucer. He died 3d October 1896, and was buried at Kelmscott, near the Oxfordshire mansion he occupied after D. G. Rossetti. See his Life and Letters by J. W. Mackail (1899). Morris strove to lead his contemporaries away from the hideousness and materialism of modern life into a beautiful garden of dreams. As a story-teller, he was endowed with the richest gift of imagination; and he was unsurpassed in the freshness of his descriptions and the music of his verse.