gone,
  Or gone, or dwindled down to some odd games
  In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out
  With cutting eights that day upon the pond, 10
  Where, three times slipping from the outer edge,
  I bump’d the ice into three several stars,
  Fell in a doze; and half-awake I heard
  The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,
  New harping on the church-commissioners, 15
  Now hawking at Geology and schism,
  Until I woke, and found him settled down
  Upon the general decay of faith
  Right thro’ the world, ’at home was little left,
  And none abroad:  there was no anchor, none; 20
  To hold by.’  Francis, laughing, clapt his hand
  On Everard’s shoulder, with ‘I hold by him.’ 
  ‘And I,’ quoth Everard, ‘by the wassail-bowl.’ 
  ‘Why yes,’ I said, ’we knew your gift that way
  At college:  but another which you had, 25
  I mean of verse (for so we held it then),
  What came of that?’ ‘You know,’ said Frank, ’he burnt
  His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books’—­
  And then to me demanding why?  ’Oh, sir,
  He thought that nothing new was said, or else 30
  Something so said ’twas nothing—–­that a truth
  Looks freshest in the fashion of the day: 
  God knows:  he has a mint of reasons:  ask. 
  It pleased me well enough,’ ‘Nay, nay,’ said Hall,
  ’Why take the style of those heroic times? 35
  For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
  Nor we those times; and why should any man
  Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
  Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,
  Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt.’  ‘But I,’ 40
  Said Francis, ‘pick’d the eleventh from this hearth’
  And have it:  keep a thing, its use will come. 
  I hoard it as a sugar-plum for Holmes.’ 
  He laugh’d, and I, tho’ sleepy, like a horse
  That hears the corn-bin open, prick’d my ears; 45
  For I remember’d Everard’s college fame
  When we were Freshmen:  then at my request
  He brought it; and the poet little urged,
  But with some prelude of disparagement,
  Read, mouthing out his hollow oes and aes, 50
  Deep-chested music, and to this result.

MORTE D’ARTHUR

  So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
  Among the mountains by the winter sea;
  Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,
  Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,
  King Arthur:  then, because his wound was deep, 5
  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. 10
  On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
  Lay a great water, and the moon was full.