147.  Made morn:  Let in the morning, or came into the full morning light as the huge gate opened.

148.  Leper:  Why did the poet make the crouching beggar a leper?

152.  For “gan shrink” the original has “did shrink.”

155.  Bent of stature:  Criticise this phrase.

158.  So he tossed ... in scorn:  This is the turning-point of the moral movement of the story.  Sir Launfal at the very beginning makes his fatal mistake; his noble spirit and lofty purposes break down with the first test.  He refuses to see a brother in the loathsome leper; the light and warmth of human brotherhood had not yet entered his soul, just as the summer sunshine had not entered the frowning castle.  The regeneration of his soul must be worked out through wandering and suffering.  Compare the similar plot of the Ancient Mariner.

163.  No true alms:  The alms must also be in the heart.

164.  Originally “He gives nothing but worthless gold.”

166.  Slender mite:  An allusion to the widow’s “two mites.” (Luke xxi, 1-4.)

168.  The all-sustaining Beauty:  The all-pervading spirit of God that unites all things in one sympathetic whole.  This divinity in humanity is its highest beauty.  In The Oak Lowell says: 

    “Lord! all thy works are lessons; each contains
    Some emblem of man’s all-containing soul.”

172.  A god goes with it:  The god-like quality of real charity, of heart to heart sympathy.  In a letter written a little after the composition of this poem Lowell speaks of love and freedom as being “the sides which Beauty presented to him then.”

172.  Store:  Plenty, abundance.

175.  Summers:  What is gained by the use of this word instead of winters?

176.  Wold:  A high, open and barren field that catches the full sweep of the wind.  The “wolds” of north England are like the “downs” of the south.

181.  The little brook:  In a letter written in December, 1848, Lowell says:  “Last night I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening landscape.  Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it.  My picture of the brook in Sir Launfal was drawn from it.”  See the poem Beaver Brook (originally called The Mill), and the winter picture in An Indian-Summer Reverie, lines 148-196.

184.  Groined:  Groined arches are formed by the intersection of two arches crossing at any angle, forming a ribbed vault; a characteristic feature of Gothic architecture.

190.  Forest-crypt:  The crypt of a church is the basement, filled with arched pillars that sustain the building.  The cavern of the brook, as the poet will have us imagine it, is like this subterranean crypt, where the pillars are like trees and the groined arches like interlacing branches, decorated with frost leaves.  The poet seems to have had in mind throughout the description the interior of the Gothic cathedrals, as shown by the many suggestive terms used, “groined,” “crypt,” “aisles,” “fretwork,” and “carvings.”