“‘So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur,’ and never yet in poetry did any sword, flung in the air, flash so superbly.

“The rest of the natural description is equally alive, and the passage where the sound echoes the sense, and Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs as he moves among the icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting, clashing sound as any to be found in Tennyson: 

  “Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
  And barren chasms, and all to left and right
  The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
  His feet on juts of slippery crag that rung
  Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.

“We hear all the changes on the vowel a—­every sound of it used to give the impression—­and then, in a moment, the verse runs into breadth, smoothness and vastness:  for Bedivere comes to the shore and sees the great water;

  “And on a sudden lo! the level lake,
  And the long glories of the winter moon,

“in which the vowel o, in its changes is used, as the vowel a has been used before.

“The questions and replies of Arthur and Bedivere, the reproaches of the King, the excuses of the Knight, the sorrow and the final wrath of Arthur, are worthy of the landscape, as they ought to be; and the dominance of the human element in the scene is a piece of noble artist-work.  Arthur is royal to the close, and when he passes away with the weeping Queens across the mere, unlike the star of the tournament he was of old, he is still the King.  Sir Bedivere, left alone on the freezing shore, hears the King give his last message to the world.  It is a modern Christian who speaks, but the phrases do not sound out of harmony with that which might be in Romance.  Moreover, the end of the saying is of Avilion or Avalon—­of the old heathen Celtic place where the wounded are healed and the old made young.”

In the final analysis, therefore, the significance of the Morte d’Arthur is a significance of beauty rather than moralistic purpose.  It has been said that the reading of Milton’s Lycidas is the surest test of one’s powers of poetical appreciation.  I fear that the test is too severe for many readers who can still enjoy a simpler style of poetry.  But any person who can read the Morte d’Arthur, and fail to be impressed by its splendid pictures, and subdued to admiration by the dignity of its language, need scarcely hope for pleasure from any poetry.

THE EPIC

3.  SACRED BUSH.  The mistletoe.  This plant was sacred to the Celtic tribes, and was an object of particular veneration with the Druids, especially when associated with the oak-tree.

8.  OR GONE=either gone.

18.  THE GENERAL DECAY OF FAITH.  The story of Arthur is intended to show how faith survives, although the form be changed.  See esp. Morte d’Arthur, ll. 240-242.