Good King Arthur is gone.  It bit deep, that blow which Mordred, the strong traitor, struck when the spear stood out a fathom behind his back; and Morgan la Fay came too late to heal the grievous wound that had taken cold.  The frank, kind, generous heart, that would not mistrust till certainty left no space for suspicion, can never be wrung or betrayed again.  The bitter parting between the lovers is over too; and Launcelot is gone to his own place, without the farewell caress he prayed for when he besought the queen “to kiss him once and never more.”  After a very few short months, the beautiful wild bird has beaten herself to death against her cage, and the vision comes by night, bidding Launcelot arise and fetch the corpse of Guenever home.  She wandered often and far in life, but where should her home be now but by the side of her husband?  Hardly and painfully in two days, he and the faithful seven accomplish the thirty miles that lay between; so utterly is that unearthly strength, before which lance-shafts were as reeds, and iron bars as silken threads (remember the May night in Meliagraunce’s castle), enfeebled and broken down.  He stands in the nunnery-church at Almesbury; he hears from the queen’s maidens of the prayer that was ever on her lips through those two days when she lay a dying, how “she besought God that she might never have power to see Sir Launcelot with her worldly eyes.”  Then, says the chronicler, “he saw her visage; yet he wept not greatly, but sighed.  And so he did all the observance of the service himself, both the dirge at night and the mass on the morrow.”  Not till every rite was performed, not till the earth had closed over the marble coffin, did Launcelot swoon.

I know nothing in fiction so piteous as the words that tell of his dreary, mortal sorrow.  “Then, Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, nor drank, but continually mourned until he was dead; and then he sickened more and more, and dried and dwined away; for the bishop nor none of his fellows might make him to eat, and little he drank; so that he waxed shorter by a cubit than he was, and the people could not know him; for evermore day and night he prayed; but needfully as nature required, sometimes he slumbered a broken sleep; and always he was lying groveling on King Arthur’s and Queen Guenever’s tomb.  And there was no comfort that his fellows could make him; it availed nothing.”

We know it can not last long; we know that the morning is fast approaching, when they will find him “stark dead, and lying as he had smiled;” when they will bear him forth, according to his vow, to his resting-place in Joyous Guard; when there will be pronounced over him that famous funeral oration—­the truest, the simplest, the noblest, I think, that ever was spoken over the body of a sinful man.

CHAPTER XXXI.

     “I pray God pardon me,
     That I no more, without a pang,
       His choicest works can see.”