Weakness is not in your word, Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Ye move through the ranks, recall DOVER BEACH THE sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand, 195 200 205 5 Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. ΙΟ 15 20 But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 25 Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems 30 To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain 35 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, REQUIESCAT STREW on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did so too! Her mirth the world required; She bathed it in smiles of glee. And now they let her be. Her life was turning, turning, In mazes of heat and sound, Her cabin'd, ample spirit, It flutter'd and fail'd for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty hall of death. 5. THE POETRY OF CHIVALRY 5 10 15 Under this heading we have included several of the most delightful of modern English poems. One of them is the work of an American the only American poem in this volume. The others are the work of Tennyson, and form a part of the wonderful series which their author has grouped together as Idylls of the King. They are all derived from early Celtic legend, and have been preserved through British tradition and English literature for more than a thousand years. The following is a very brief account of the origin and history of the legends treated in these poems. Sometime shortly before 1150 a Welsh priest, Geoffrey of Monmouth as he was called, put together in twelve short books of Latin prose what purported to be a history of the early kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britannia). Beside the stories of King Lear and of Locrine (father of the Sabrina of Milton's Comus), this "history" entered fully into an account of the more than half-legendary "King Arthur," who is fabled to have died about 550 A.D., or six hundred years before the time of Geoffrey. Geoffrey says that he derived his stories from earlier Celtic writers; he was certainly indebted to early Celtic tradition, perhaps of Brittany as well as of Wales and Ireland. This so-called History had scarcely been written before it was turned into French verse by a certain Geoffrey Gaimar, and in this way it passed over into France. Not more than five years elapsed when it was retranslated and added to by Wace, another poet of the Norman-French; and thus during the latter part of the twelfth century the story was constantly enlarged and altered, in verse and in prose, by the writers of both England and the Continent. Among the additions of this period was that of Walter Map, a Welshman, who is supposed to have combined with the original Arthurian legend the legend of the Holy Grail. So far the story had appeared only in the original Latin of Geoffrey, and in the French or Norman-French versions of his translators. But about 1205 an English priest named Layamon felt inspired to tell in his own language the story of those "who first had English land." Accordingly, from the translations of Wace and other Normans, as well as from Celtic legends and Teutonic sagas which he himself knew, he built up, in the purest of English verse, a wonderful poem of over thirty thousand lines. This poem he called the Brut, from the reputed founder of Britain, Brutus, great-grandson of Æneas. In this poem the original story gains numerous additions which, so far as known, had not before appeared in written form. Among these are the episodes of the founding of the Round Table, and of the mysteries attending the birth and the "passing" of Arthur. From the first "King Arthur" proved the favorite of the many romantic tales which stirred the imagination and exercised the invention of French and Norman writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The variations of the legend and the additions to it became almost numberless, yet, strange to say, it was nearly a hundred years after the time of Layamon before it again found its way into an English version. But this tardiness is at last well compensated for by the merits of the Morte Darthur. This was written by Sir Thomas Malory about 1470, and printed some fifteen years later as one of the hundred works which came from the press of Caxton. The book consisted of a translation of the various French legends of the Round Table and the combination of them in one splendid "prose-poem," couched in the richest and most melodious English. This work of Malory not only is important because it preserved to the English-speaking world the stories of Arthur and his knights; it is also, in its own right, probably the finest English literary production of the fifteenth century. Since the time of Malory many poets have made use of the Arthurian story, chief among them Tennyson in his splendid Idylls of the King. But before we enter into an examination of the Idylls, we shall turn to an American poet, who, like Tennyson, has infused into this story of early chivalry a moral force and ethical significance which had little place with early English romance or early Celtic bard. The characters of the Idylls of the King are set "in a rich and varied landscape." The action is large, the actors many. To these stirring poems The Vision of Sir Launfal forms both a contrast and a supplement. Though not dealing with a hero of the Round Table or with the events of King |