Then she stretch'd out her arms and cried aloud

'Oh Arthur!' there her voice brake suddenly,

Then as a stream that spouting from a cliff

Fails in mid air, but gathering at the base Re-makes itself, and flashes down the vale

Went on in passionate utterance:

'Gone-my lord!

Gone thro' my sin to slay and to be slain ! And he forgave me, and I could not speak. Farewell? I should have answer'd his farewell.

His mercy choked me. Gone, my lord the King,

My own true lord! how dare I call him mine?

The shadow of another cleaves to me,
And makes me one pollution: he, the
King,
Call'd me polluted shall I kill myself?
What help in that? I cannot kill my sin,
If soul be soul; nor can I kill my shame;
No, nor by living can I live it down.
The days will grow to weeks, the weeks
to months,

The months will add themselves and make the years,

The years will roll into the centuries,
And mine will ever be a name of scorn.
I must not dwell on that defeat of fame.
Let the world be; that is but of the world
What else? what hope? I think there was
a hope,

Except he mock'd me when he spake of hope;

His hope he call'd it; but he never mocks, For mockery is the fume of little hearts. And blessed be the King, who hath for

given

My wickedness to him, and left me hope That in mine own heart I can live down

sin

And be his mate hereafter in the heavens Before high God. Ah great and gentle

lord,

Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint

'Ye know me then, that wicked one, who broke

The vast design and purpose of the King. O shut me round with narrowing nunnerywalls,

Meek maidens, from the voices crying "shame."

I must not scorn myself: he loves me still. Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

So let me, if you do not shudder at me, Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;

Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,

Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;

Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,

But not rejoicing; mingle with your rites; Pray and be pray'd for; lie before your shrines;

Do each low office of your holy house; Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole To poor sick people, richer in His eyes Who ransom'd us, and haler too than I;

THAT story which the bold Sir Bedivere, First made and latest left of all the knights,

Told, when the man was no more than a voice

In the white winter of his age, to those With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.

For

on their march to westward, Bedivere,

Who slowly paced among the slumbering host,

Heard in his tent the moanings of the King:

'I found Him in the shining of the stars, I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields,

But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful?
Or else as if the world were wholly fair,
But that these eyes of men are dense and
dim,

And have not power to see it as it is:
Perchance, because we see not to the

close ;

In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown

Along a wandering wind, and past his ear Went shrilling, Hollow, hollow all delight!

Hail, King! to-morrow thou shalt pass

away.

Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind,

And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.' And fainter onward, like wild birds that change

Their season in the night and wail their way

From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream

Shrill'd; but in going mingled with dim cries

Far in the moonlit haze among the hills, As of some lonely city sack'd by night, When all is lost, and wife and child with wail

Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call'd, 'Who spake? A dream. the wind,

O light upon

Thine, Gawain, was the voice—are these dim cries

Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild

will,

And have but stricken with the sword in

vain ;

And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death:

Nay-God my Christ-I pass but shall not die.'

This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and

spake :

west,

There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain

kill'd

And care not thou for dreams from him.

but rise

I hear the steps of Modred in the west,

And with him many of thy people, and

knights

Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but

grosser grown

Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.

Right well in heart they know thee for the King.

Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.'

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedi

vere :

'Far other is this battle in the west Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,

And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,

Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,

And shook him thro' the north. Ill doom is mine

To war against my people and my knights. The king who fights his people fights

himself.

And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke

That strikes them dead is as my death to

me.

Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I

saw

One lying in the dust at Almesbury, Hath folded in the passes of the world.'

Then rose the King and moved his host by night,

And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse-
A land of old upheaven from the abyss
By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
Where fragments of forgotten peoples
dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.
There the pursuer could pursue no more,
And he that fled no further fly the King;
And there, that day when the great light
of heaven

Burn'd at his lowest in the rolling year, On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.

A deathwhite mist slept over sand and

sea:

Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew

Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold

With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell

Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew ;

And some had visions out of golden youth,

And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was many a noble deed, many a base, And chance and craft and strength in

single fights,

And ever and anon with host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,

Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash

Of battleaxes on shatter'd helms, and shrieks

After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the

mist;

And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,

Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs

In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

Last, as by some one deathbed after

wail

Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death