“At this a hundred bells began to peal,
  That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed,
  The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn.”

THE ALLEGORICAL ELEMENT.—­The statement is made on p. xxxv of this book that in The Idylls of the King “the effort is made to reconcile the human story with the allegory, and in consequence the issues are confusedly presented to our mind.”  It is characteristic of the Morte d’Arthur fragment that it is apparently free from all allegorical intention.  It is merely a moving human story with a fascinating element of mystery inspired by the original Celtic legend.  An element of allegory lies in the epilogue, and The Passing of Arthur still further enforces the allegorical purpose.  But here, as Mr. Brooke again writes (p. 371), “we are close throughout to the ancient tale.  No allegory, no ethics, no rational soul, no preaching symbolism, enter here, to dim, confuse, or spoil the story.  Nothing is added which does not justly exalt the tale, and what is added is chiefly a greater fulness and breadth of humanity, a more lovely and supreme Nature, arranged at every point to enhance into keener life the human feelings of Arthur and his knight, to lift the ultimate hour of sorrow and of death into nobility.  Arthur is borne 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.

“What a noble framework—­and with what noble consciousness it is drawn! . . . .  All the landscape—­than which nothing better has been invented by any English poet—­lives from point to point as if Nature herself had created it; but even more alive than the landscape are the two human figures in it—­Sir Bedivere standing by the great water, and Arthur lying wounded near the chapel, waiting for his knight.  Take one passage, which to hear is to see the thing: 

  “So saying, from the ruin’d 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 zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
  Came on the shining levels of the lake.

“Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks:  ’What hast thou seen, what heard?’ Bedivere answers: 

  “’I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
  And the wild water lapping on the crag,’

“—­lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns that I never stand in solitude beside their waters but I hear the verses in my heart.  At the last he throws it.

  “The great brand
  Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
  And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch,
  Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
  Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
  By night, with noises of the northern sea.