10

'Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest, The King is king, and ever wills the highest. Clang battle-axe, and clash brand. Let the King reign!

'Blow, for our Sun is mighty in his May!

5 Blow, for our Sun is mightier day by day!

Clang battle-axe, and clash brand! Let the King reign!

"The King will follow Christ, and we the King, In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing. Fall battle-axe, and clash brand! Let the King reign!'

So sang the knighthood, moving to their hall. There at the banquet those great lords from Rome, The slowly-fading mistress of the world,

Strode in and claim'd their tribute as of yore.

But Arthur spake: 'Behold for these have sworn
15 To wage my wars, and worship me their King;
The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
And we that fight for our fair father Christ,
Seeing that ye be grown too weak and old
To drive the heathen from your Roman wall,
20 No tribute will we pay.' So those great lords
Drew back in wrath, and Arthur strove with Rome.

And Arthur and his knighthood for a space
Were all one will, and thro' that strength the King
Drew in the petty princedoms under him,

25 Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame
The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reign'd.

HELPS TO STUDY.

Historical: "The Coming of Arthur" and "The Passing of Arthur'' are taken from Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," which he dedicated to the memory of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria.

Notes and Questions.

Words and Phrases for Discussion.

THE PASSING OF ARTHUR.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.

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

5 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, 10 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, 15 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, 20 And have not power to see it as it is:

Perchance, because we see not to the close; For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain; And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend 25 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." Then, ere that last weird battle in the west, 30 There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill'd

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. 5 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 10 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 15 Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call'd, "Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind, Thine, Gawain, was the voice are these dim cries Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?"

20

This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake:
"O me, my King, let pass whatever will,
Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field;
But in their stead thy name and glory cling
To all high places like a golden cloud
25 For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass.
Light was Gawain in life, and light in death
Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man;
And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise
I hear the steps of Modred in the west,

30 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 Bedivere: "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, 5 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
10 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,

15

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 Lyonesse

A land of old upheaven from the abyss
By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
20 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,

25 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

30 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