1 According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus partook of the Last Supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word, and deed; but one of the keepers having broken this condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a favorite enterprise of the knights of Arthur's court to go in search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most exquisite of his poems.

The plot (if I may give that name to anything so slight) of the following poem is my own, and, to serve its purposes, I have enlarged the circle of competition in search of the miraculous cup in such a manner as to include, not only other persons than the heroes of the Round Table, but also a period of time subsequent to the supposed date of King Arthur's reign. (LOWELL.) 2 Holmes begins a poem of welcome to Lowell on his return from England:

This is your month, the month of perfect days.' June was indeed Lowell's month. Not only in the famous passage of this Prelude,' but in Under the Willows (originally called 'A June Idyl'), 'Al Fresco (originally A Day in June'), Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line' of the Biglow Papers, and The Nightingale in the Study,' he has made it peculiarly his

own.

3 Heaven lies about us in our Infancy! (WORDSWORTH, in the fifth stanza of the 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality.'

See Lowell's letter, of Sunday, September 3, 1848, to his friend C. F. Briggs.

And to our age's drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea.

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Earth gets its price for what Earth gives

us;

The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,

The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,

We bargain for the graves we lie in; At the devil's booth are all things sold, Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;

For a cap and bells our lives we pay, Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking:

"T is heaven alone that is given away, "T is only God may be had for the ask

ing;

No price is set on the lavish summer; June may be had by the poorest comer.

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might,

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An instinct within it that reaches and

Now is the high-tide of the year,

And whatever of life hath ebbed away Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer, Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;

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Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,

We are happy now because God wills it; No matter how barren the past may have been,

'T is enough for us now that the leaves are green;

We sit in the warm shade and feel right well

How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;

We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing

That skies are clear and grass is growing;

The breeze comes whispering in our ear,
That dandelions are blossoming near,

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That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,

That the river is bluer than the sky, That the robin is plastering his house hard by;

And if the breeze kept the good news

The little birds sang as if it were The one day of summer in all the year, And the very leaves seemed to sing on the

trees:

The castle alone in the landscape lay
Like an outpost of winter, dull and gray:
'T was the proudest hall in the North
Countree,

And never its gates might opened be,
Save to lord or lady of high degree;
Summer besieged it on every side,
But the churlish stone her assaults defied;
She could not scale the chilly wall,
Though around it for leagues her pavilions
tall

Stretched left and right,
Over the hills and out of sight;

Green and broad was every tent,
And out of each a murmur went
Till the breeze fell off at night.

III

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The drawbridge dropped with a surly clang,
And through the dark arch a charger sprang,
Bearing Sir Launfal, the maiden knight, 130
In his gilded mail, that flamed so bright
It seemed the dark castle had gathered all
Those shafts the fierce sun had shot over

its wall

1 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. But why do I send you this description-like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends. (LOWELL, to Briggs, in a letter of December, 1848, just after the publication of Sir Launfal. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

Within the hall are song and laughter, The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter

With lightsome green of ivy and holly; Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide

Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;
The broad flame-pennons droop and flap

And belly and tug as a flag in the wind; Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap, Hunted to death in its galleries blind; 220 And swift little troops of silent sparks, Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear,

Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks Like herds of startled deer.

PART SECOND

I

THERE was never a leaf on bush or tree, The bare boughs rattled shudderingly; 241 The river was dumb and could not speak,

For the weaver Winter its shroud had

spun;

A single crow on the tree-top bleak

From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun;

Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold,
As if her veins were sapless and old,
And she rose up decrepitly

For a last dim look at earth and sea.

II

Sir Launfal's raiment thin and spare
Was idle mail 'gainst the barbèd air,
For it was just at the Christmas time; 260
So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime,
And sought for a shelter from cold and

snow

In the light and warmth of long-ago;
He sees the snake-like caravan crawl
O'er the edge of the desert, black and

small,

Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,
He can count the camels in the sun,
As over the red-hot sands they pass
To where, in its slender necklace of grass,
The little spring laughed and leapt in the

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shade, And with its own self like an infant played, And waved its signal of palms.

IV

'For Christ's sweet sake, I beg an alms;' The happy camels may reach the spring, But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing,

The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone, That cowers beside him, a thing as lone