Thus the gleam of possible purity shoots through the night of despair. Her repentance is complete, and out of it will grow that diviner vision of a soul no longer chained to Sense. She sees, through her growing purity, what she had not seen before, the real glory of Arthur.

"Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint

Among his warring senses, to thy knights.'"

Her vision grows to the height of his pure sublimity, and the radiance of it flashes down upon her, like living fire to consume her evil.

666

". . . Now I see thee what thou art,
Thou art the highest and most human too,
Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none
Will tell the King I love him tho' so late?

She had looked upon of Sense, and seeing no had turned to Lancelot. Soul, and "that pure severity of perfect light," his spiritual supremacy, charms her into love and adoration. The result is that, knowing now the real Arthur, her pain is great, in that she had not known him before.

him ever with the eyes I warmth and colour" she Now she sees him through

"Ah, my God,

What might I not have made of Thy fair world,
Had I but loved Thy highest creature here ? ""

But she is saved by the thought of his love. Long ago by the stately altar he had vowed "I love thee

to the death," and when she lay in the dust, under the shadow of her shame, and Arthur stood within the shadow of his death, he was still unchanged, and out of a broken heart declared

"Let no man dream but that I love thee still! ' "

It is the memory of his love that saves her, and we hear the resolve of a nobler life breathing in the line,

"I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.''

Thus in Guinevere the carnal nature is redeemed at last by love. For her good deeds and pure life she was chosen Abbess, when she lived for three years and then passed "to where beyond these voices there is peace;" and Soul, though late, triumphed over Sense.

The poem is a parable. Arthur is the spiritual man, subduing and moulding his Knights of the lawless passions into chastity and obedience, until he becomes as the conscience of a saint among them.

Guinevere bodies the sensual or carnal nature to which Arthur, the spiritual soul, is wedded. The antagonism between Arthur and Guinevere is the conflict waged in every human life between flesh and spirit. The problem for the spirit is how to save and purify the body. Arthur's love redeems both body and soul. A pure spiritual fire in the

The

house of the body will burn up its evil, so that it becomes the shrine of the saintly life.

When the senses, like the Knights, submit to conscience, then the soul flashes down its splendour, life is redeemed in its depths as well as in its heights, and the union is complete.

"Hereafter in that world where all are pure

We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband. . . .

IN "The Passing of Arthur" the soul wages Passing of its last war with death. When the Knights Arthur. are dead and Guinevere a dream and Arthur

a memory old Sir Bedivere tells the story of the last great battle.

As he walked among the sleeping warriors, nearing the tent of the King, he heard the pathetic lament of Arthur, who had seen God in the stars and the flowers

"But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.'

His own work seemed a failure.

". . . All my realm

Reels back into the beast, and is no more.

My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death.""

The soul in conflict with death is tremulous with doubt; but only for a passing moment.

"Nay—God my Christ—I pass but shall not die.”’

There is a life which death cannot kill, an immortality of deeds that flows on, like a pure stream, to sweeten other lives. There is for such a deathlessness in death. The doubt of Arthur is slain by the consciousness of immortality. His work may be a seeming failure, and the ways of God a mystery; but he is assured "I shall not die." His pure soul, by noble deeds, had wrought itself into humanity.

Then Sir Bedivere relates how the King had slept and dreamed of the ghost of Gawain wailing on the wandering wind

". . . 'Hollow, hollow all delight!

Hail, King! to-morrow thou shalt pass away.
Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.'

In the old superstition it was usual for an apparition to predict a battle with its results. The ghost of Gawain suggests, moreover, that what a man is here, he will be hereafter.

He

Gawain had lived a frivolous, empty human life, with corresponding results in the other world. had sown to the wind and he reaps the whirlwind; death does not change character, it merely projects it within the curtain; we start in eternity where we leave off in time.

"Light was Gawain in life and light in death,"

and light after death!

The dream troubled the King, but Bedivere was

not superstitious; he did not believe in apparitions and omens; he was calm and practical, with calculating common-sense. He relates how he urged the King to shake off the nervous dread and fling himself with courage into the battle; he had heard the tramp of Modred and the rebel knights, then, let the King

"Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.""

We feel the gloom in the heart of Arthur, and the closing of the night about him in his pathetic reply:

"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 the King rose and flung himself into the last weird battle. In that "deathwhite mist" we hear the clashing of steel, the wail of voices, and the moan of dying men. The death-storm sweeps

into silence both friend and foe. The realism of the description suggests the spiritual significance.

The sun is burning low, and is a symbol of the flickering fire of life.

A "deathwhite mist" sleeps o'er land and sea; in which we have the image of death veiling the vision of the dying.

The cold creates a "formless fear"; suggesting the fear of the soul tremulous on the threshold of the unknown.