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is said that she was weak and silly and ought not to have yielded to the unjust jealousy and mad caprice of her husband, and that there could be no "woman's rights" were we all Enids. We reply, Enid is the ideal of womanhood. Her love is ideal just because she can go on loving and trusting Geraint when he responds only with scorn and suspicion and jealousy. She might have resented his conduct and no one could have blamed her; she would have been within her woman's rights: but then her love would have fallen short of the ideal the ideal that can love and wait, believing that the mystery will be cleared and the heart won again by the love and the waiting. Further, the wisdom of her obedience is challenged. She is spoken of as weak and blind in obeying the cruel commands of Geraint. But, observe, she discriminates, she obeys where obedience, painful for her, is no hurt to him, as when she drove the horses on before: but she disobeys when obedience might result in injury to him. Her obedience is thus ideal, because in all it considers the good of the object loved. If she had stood upon her "rights" she would not have won again the heart of Geraint, but because she waived her "rights" and loved him even in the mystery, and obeyed with wise discrimination, she wins the victory in the end. Enid is thus the type of the soul that does not live by sense merely, but by love and trust and obedience when mystery

Balin and Balan.

enfolds it. So she conquers Geraint, who is now no longer the sense-bound life, but he sees the spiritual beauty, the deathless angel, within the soul of Enid.

Here then we have the central truth which the poet sings so sublimely, and teaches with ever-wider range so earnestly—that the highest life is only reached through that moral energy which strikes down every lawless passion. Self-indulgence is best cured by self-sacrifice. Ignoble jealousy is best crushed by the higher love that "thinks no evil."

66 .. Nor did he doubt her more,
But rested in her fealty, till he crown'd
A happy life with a fair death. . . .”

IN "Balin and Balan" we trace the tragic results of cherished evil in Arthur's court. The air is thickening and the shadows are deepening. The taint impregnates the whole atmosphere, and the realm of Arthur is in danger. Lancelot and Guinevere must be held morally responsible for the tragedy that follows. Evil is gauged by its results. Its circle may be wide, but its centre is the same, and the centre must be held responsible for the circle.

The story begins with Pellam the king, who had taken sides with Lot and lost his kingdom, which, however, Arthur had restored on the condition of

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his paying tribute. Pellam had become an ascetic, and was so absorbed in other worldliness as to forget the duties of earth.

He thinks more about Arimathean Joseph, the saints and the relics, than of his lawful debts. He is the type of asceticism that degraded religion by cherishing its shell and sacrificing its kernel. While he will allow no women to pass his palace gates, his son Garlon is both sensualist and assassin ! He is so dead to the world as to forget he owes tribute. It is a phase of the ascetic life that separates itself from the currents of humanity. It dies into a stagnant pool. The asceticism that makes Pellam a hypocrite also drives his son into secret sensualism and cowardly murder.

The pious Pellam not having paid his tribute, Arthur commands his treasurer to wait upon the defaulter and remind him that "Man's word is God in man." The treasurer hesitates, fearing the two strange knights, Balin and Balan, who sit by the well of Camelot, but, ordered not to molest them, he passes on to the court of Pellam.

King Arthur appears at the well where Balin and Balan are "sitting statuelike." When asked why, they reply, "For the sake of glory," and boast of their victories over Arthur's Knights. The King answers that he too is of Arthur's hall and challenges them to combat; but he lightly smites them down, and leaves them to their own reflec

tions. Ere long he sends and commands them to his hall. Then Balin tells the story of his life, how he had been a Knight of the King's, but in nature was "the savage," and had struck in passion one of Arthur's thralls, with the result that the King had sent him into exile and his life had been bitter in its fury; but now he thought that if the King could hear of his prowess by the well, he might make his brother Balan, knight, who was "ten times worthier." Resolved to tell the whole truth, he confesses how that very day they had fallen before an unknown knight. Arthur, impressed by his honesty, restores him to knighthood.

"Rise, my true knight. As children learn, be thou
Wiser for falling! walk with me, and move

To music with thine Order and the King.'

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Thereafter, when Sir Balin enter'd hall,

The Lost one Found was greeted as in Heaven."

Balan, the guardian angel of his brother, is also received into the Order.

The treasurer, returning from the court of Pellam, reports the mummery of his ascetic life. Pellam, in his other worldliness, had referred him to his son Garlon for the tribute, who paid it “railing at thine and thee." He had also found in the

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woods the body of a Knight of Arthur's, spearstricken from behind," and had suspected Garlon : but a woodman had told him of a demon, once a man, driven by evil tongues to hate his fellows,

who sallied from a cave, and from behind flashed his deadly spear. Superstition thus accounts for the natural by the supernatural. The "fiend"

Garlon disguised.

Arthur at once calls for a Knight

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'Who will hunt for me

This demon of the woods?' . . ."

Balan claims the quest, and ere he rides away embraces Balin and warns him against himself.

"Let not thy moods prevail, when I am gone
Who used to lay them! hold them outer fiends,
Who leap at thee to tear thee; shake them aside.'"

He commends Balin to the purity and fellowship of his Order, all unconscious of the serpent coiled within the "flowery welcome." To Balan, Arthur's hall is the ideal life.

"No more of hatred than in Heaven itself,
No more of jealousy than in Paradise!'"

He

Sir Balin, left to himself, becomes reflective. is conscious that he is far from having realised the ideal of Arthur. The qualities that make the ideal are courtesy and manhood and knighthood, the last combining strength and gentleness.

Now observe: Balin is not satisfied with having the ideal in the abstract, but he must see it in the actual. Sir Lancelot, being the favourite of the King and Queen, is regarded throughout the court as the ideal knight. Wherefore Balin "hovered

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