but the soul cannot soar to that high life and Divine-it must go by way of the thousand steps of persistent effort: yet ever in the "sounding hall" of prayer may be heard the heavenly voice of hope. Sir Lancelot toiled on and upward until at a door he heard """Glory and joy and honour to our Lord And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail."'" He forced the door and entered, was blinded with the glare as of a great furnace, and swooned in the awful light that smote him. "'O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail, Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes. But what I saw was veil'd And cover'd; and this Quest was not for me.' The unveiled vision is not permitted Lancelot, that he may learn the lesson of reverence. Reverence will wait with deep humility praying, "Lord, Lord, open unto us," but Lancelot "essay'd the door." Thus, in the ascending series of faith and prayer and persistence, we find that reverence in the presence of the Awful Purity is essential to the unveiled vision; but Lancelot is permitted to see the veiled glory. He sees enough to make him pure, and in the end he dies a "holy man." What, now, is the King's estimate of the conduct and the character of his Knights? """Blessed are Bors, Lancelot and Percivale, For these have seen according to their sight." The Holy Grail was to them them a symbol of purity, and their spirits were cleansed by fiery trial or spiritual warfare. But the many knights-like Gawain-who sought the Holy Grail, not for its spiritual significance, but because of superficial sentiment or sensuous excitement, followed "wander ing fires." In them Sense triumphed over Soul. The spiritual Knights saw "according to their sight"; looking for purity they found purity. The sensuous knights-the greater number-won no vision of the spiritual, for they had no eye for it. They would have lived more noble lives, and done more noble deeds, if they had been content to do the work nearest to them. The King had uttered a prophecy which in the end was verified. "Your places being vacant at my side, This chance of noble deeds will come and go Thus the Round Table of the King was broken, and the Knights, upon whose souls he had momentarily flashed his likeness, who had fought his foes and won his battles, were scattered. The idyll surely teaches that highest life is found and holiest vision won at the "Table Round" of duty, and in strenuous effort to fulfil the plain prosaic duties of life, however loveless. To some few, like the "holy maiden," it may be given to find the highest and the best in spiritual mysticism, but, for most of us, the safest way lies in making the best of our life where it is, and, like the King himself, in never wandering from the allotted field," and in fighting our evil where we are bravely and patiently. So we shall find a light not of earth, and a vision that shall not pass. Guinevere. """Who may not wander from the allotted field Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come, THROUGH all these years the victory had been on the side of Sense. When Guinevere first rode with Lancelot among the flowers the evil was wrought. She learned to love this courtly Knight, with his warmth of colour. As years passed love deepened; they met in secret and pledged their vows. Suspicion haunted the court, * "These three lines in Arthur's speech are the (spiritually) central lines of the Idylls."-TENNYSON, A Memoir, ii., p. 90. and conscience grappled with their heart-strings. Soul clashed in furious battle with Sense. The agony of Lancelot was stamped upon his face. "The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, In battle with the love he bare his lord, Had marr'd his face and mark'd it ere his time." And so, with Guinevere, Sense did not become regnant without a struggle. She is stronger on the sensuous than on the moral side, her mental powers dominate the spiritual, but she has just enough conscience to make her feel. The remorse of Guinevere, in the earlier scenes, never deepens beyond regret. 66 'I for you This many a year have done despite and wrong I did acknowledge nobler.' The regret is not deep, though it suggests a spark of conscience which may flame again. As years pass her reason is more alive to the danger. The guilty love being cooler and more calculating, she becomes suspicious of Modred. "She half-foresaw that he, the subtle beast, Would track her guilt until he found, and hers The sense of shame and regret awakens, but even the regret is almost selfish. There is no thought of the great wrong done to Arthur, or of the loss to herself in not having "loved the best and highest." As yet she thinks only of her fair name, defamed, should Modred learn the secret. But shame for a lost name is a moral quality which may be strengthened. The fact is, Guinevere had not yet realised the badness of her sin. She had toyed with it so long that its features had changed, and ceased to be repulsive. She does not as yet see her sin, only herself lost to fame and name; but conscience is stirring, and a pulse of nobler life begins to beat. We feel how much stronger it has grown in the lines, "Henceforward too, the Powers that tend the soul, And save it even in extremes, began To vex and plague her. . . .” Even in her dreams conscience makes her coward. She dreams that a shadow falls from out the sun; it broadens and blackens until land and cities are swathed and burned in the fiery darkness. It is the shadow of her evil which she sees through the eyes of awakened conscience, falling dark and deadly over the fair realm of the King. This slow awakening of the moral nature in Guinevere is an instructive study. Conscience has now so far reasserted itself that she seriously proposes to Lancelot their final separation! "O Lancelot, get thee hence to thine own land, |