by exquisite beauties and dignities, indeed by incomparable lines, but because the poem as a whole does, as it goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of significance.  All the great epics of the world have, however, perfectly clearly a significance in close relation with the spirit of their time; the intense desire to symbolize the consciousness of man as far as it has attained, is what vitally inspires an epic poet, and the ardour of this infects his whole style.  Morris, in this sense, was not vitally inspired. Sigurd the Volsung is a kind of set exercise in epic poetry.  It is great, but it is not needed.  It is, in fact, an attempt to write epic poetry as it might have been written, and to make epic poetry mean what it might have meant, in the days when the tale of Sigurd and the Niblungs was newly come among men’s minds.  Mr. Doughty, in his surprising poem The Dawn in Britain, also seems trying to compose an epic exercise, rather than to be obeying a vital necessity of inspiration.  For all that, it is a great poem, full of irresistible vision and memorable diction.  But it is written in a revolutionary syntax, which, like most revolutions of this kind, achieves nothing beyond the fact of being revolutionary; and Mr. Doughty often uses the unexpected effects of his queer syntax instead of the unexpected effects of poetry, which makes the poem even longer psychologically than it is physically.  Lander’s Gebir has much that can truly be called epic in it; and it has learned the lessons in manner which Virgil and Milton so nobly taught.  It has perhaps learned them too well; never were concision, and the loading of each word with heavy duties, so thoroughly practised.  The action is so compressed that it is difficult to make out exactly what is going on; we no sooner realize that an incident has begun than we find ourselves in the midst of another.  Apart from these idiosyncrasies, the poetry of Gebir is a curious mixture of splendour and commonplace.  If fiction could ever be wholly, and not only partially, epic, it would be in Gebir.

In all these poems, we see an epic intention still combined with a recognizably epic manner.  But what is quite evident is, that in all of them there is no attempt to carry on the development of epic, to take up its symbolic power where Milton left it.  On the contrary, this seems to be deliberately avoided.  For any tentative advance on Miltonic significance, even for any real acceptance of it, we must go to poetry which tries to put epic intention into a new form.  Some obvious peculiarities of epic style are sufficiently definite to be detachable.  Since Theocritus, a perverse kind of pleasure has often been obtained by putting some of the peculiarities of epic—­peculiarities really required by a very long poem—­into the compass of a very short poem.  An epic idyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable epic intention; it is wrought out of the mere shell of epic, and avoids