Excalibur, the mystic sword which Arthur wielded
so long and so well, vanishes with him from the
world, but the heavenly weapons wherewith men
fight the good fight are still bestowed upon the
heroes of the successive ages, differing in form and
temper, but effective for the various work, and fitted
to the hands that are to wield them.
Not only
has each age its new work to do, its new in-
struments and new men to do it, as matter of
historical fact, but it must be so,-

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

The Arthur of the round-table is gone to fableland; but the desire and hope that gave birth to the legends of chivalry yet live, the dim prophecy that he will one day return and rule over Britain is ever accomplishing itself. What mean those Christmas bells that tell us yearly Christ is born? Do they lie? No! they blend with all noble legends that speak of man's great deeds, of his vaster aspirations, of his yet unaccomplished hopes. They remind us of the prophecy to which fact is tending, of the ideal after which the real is striving. To him whose heart is hopeful and brave, who will not be the slave of formulas, Arthur is come again,

and cannot die,' is the burden of the world's song; 'Come again, and thrice as fair,' is heard in every change by which the thoughts of men are widened and their hearts enlarged; 'Come with all good things, and war shall be no more,' the strain that echoes clear in the distance, and most clear when the church bells ring in the Christmas morn. Morte d'Arthur is no mere story out of an old book, refurbished with modern ornaments, but a song of hope, a prophecy of the final triumph of good. Mr. Tennyson has, indeed, lavished upon the story all the resources of a genius eminently pictorial, and trained to complete mastery over language and metre. He might unquestionably have silenced the parson in a more simple and direct fashion, by which he would not only have deprived us of a noble piece of painting, but have missed a poetic and profoundly true method of looking at national legends. poem justifies itself, by its finished excellence, as a work of art, but it is spiritualized and raised above merely pictorial and dramatic beauty by its setting, and the poet's nineteenth-century point of view.

The

Mr. Tennyson makes the supposed author, Everard Hall, talk of his fragment as

Faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth,-
Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt.

They are rather Virgilian than Homeric echoes; elaborate and stately, not naïve and eager to tell their story; rich in pictorial detail; carefully studied; conscious of their own art; more anxious for beauty of workmanship than interest of action. But since John Dryden died, no English poet has written verse so noble, so sonorous, of such sustained majesty and might; no English poet has brought pictures so clear and splendid before the eye by the power of single epithets and phrases; and Dryden himself never wrote a poem so free from careless lines, unmeaning words, and conventional epithets. The fragment bursts upon us like the blended blast and wail of the trumpets of pursuing and retreating hosts a whole day's alternate victory and defeat, a series of single combats, the death of the leaders one by one, the drawing off of the armies at sunset, King Arthur alone and wounded on the field, the coming on of night and the rising of the moon, the approach of King Arthur's last captain to bear him to a place of shelter, are pictured to the imagination in the few vigorous lines that commence the poem.

So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's table, man by man,
Had fall'n in Lyonness about their Lord,

King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

That phrase, a great water,' has probably often been ridiculed as affected phraseology for ‘a great lake'; but it is an instance of the intense presentative power of Mr. Tennyson's genius. It precisely marks the appearance of a large lake outspread and taken in at one glance from a high ground. Had a great lake' been substituted for it, the phrase would have needed to be translated by the mind into water of a certain shape and size, before the picture was realized by the imagination. 'A great lake' is, in fact, one degree removed from the sensuous to the logical, from the individual appearance to the generic name, and is therefore less poetic and pictorial.

With what distinctness, with what force and conciseness of language, is the whole scene of the churchyard, with its associations, brought before the mind: its ancestral relics, the ruins of the chapel, the piercing cold of the night-wind edged with seasalt, the sharp rocks down which the path to the lake descends :

So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept,
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down,
By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock,

Came on the shining levels of the lake.

The classical æquora may have suggested the 'shining levels'; but there is a deeper reason for the change of phrase, for the 'great water,' as seen from the high ground, becomes a series of flashing surfaces when Sir Bedivere looks along it from its margin.

This pictorial reality is kept up through the poem. Excalibur does not merely sparkle in the moonlight with its jewelled hilt, but

The winter moon,

Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth

And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt.

Sir Bedivere does not doubt whether he shall throw the sword, but stands

This way and that, dividing the swift mind,

In act to throw.

None the worse a phrase for recalling the Virgilian 'Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc.' The 'many-knotted waterflags' are not brought in simply to hide Excalibur, they must add their life to the picture, and

Whistle stiff and dry about the marge.