'Free love, so bound, were freest,' said the king. It was not his misfortune that he sacrificed the joy of pure and wedded love to his exultant love of honor, and that so he fell into his shameless love of Guinevere. It was his sin, as, afterwards, he sorrowfully saw. His story is to us the story of a proud and godless love of glory, leading at last to infamy and wretchedness. During the quest of the Sanc Greal, it seemed, indeed, that he had "left pride and taken him unto humilitie." And yet, again and again, did it become needful that he should receive warning and rebuke for his "evil faith and poore beleeve, the which," as was once told him, "will make thee to fall into the deepe pit of hell, if thou keepe thee not." "Hee hath taken upon him," said a goodly hermit, "to forsake sinne; and were not that hee is unstable, but by his thought he is like to turn againe, he should be next to achieve the Sanc Greal. But God knoweth well his thought and his unstableness." And so, although at last he came nigh unto the Sanc Greal, and saw the great glory and "clearnesse" which shone round about it, and heard the melody of a voice "which sung so sweetly that it seemed no earthly thing, and him thought that the voice said 'joy and honor be to the Father of heaven,””—yet he could not approach to it, nor be fed with it, but was smitten down as by a blast of fire, so that he lay as dead for many days. And when the quest was over, and he had come again to the round table, he "forgat the promise and profession that he made in the quest," and went back again to all his sinful love. This was the state of things when the fair maid Elaine "cast such a love unto Sir Launcelot," a love of which he was unworthy, a love which in his blindness and his willfulness he cast aside, but a love which took great vengeance on him afterward when, all remorsefully, he gazed upon that funeral barge that floated down from Astolat, and knew that there was lying one who loved him with a purity and strength and simple truth which Guinevere could never show to him, and which he could not ever know again. Such is, in part, the history of Lancelot, and such his character, a character of wonderful interest and drawn with great force and spirit. There is a splendor and a nobility about it which make it strangely fascinating, and which, as it seems to us, showing as they do how magnificently good he might have been, make the great blackness of the sin which he committed the more hideous and hateful. It sometimes happens that we find, among military men particularly, instances of character in which the noblest force and courage are combined with great simplicity, and with exquisite tenderness and delicacy of sensibility. Not to mention some real instances in history, which will readily occur to the memory of our readers, the character of Colonel Newcome, in recent English fiction, is such an one. And we hazard little in saying that in all our modern fictitious literature there are few characters so beautiful and so irresistibly fascinating. Somewhat the same elements of grandeur and of beauty are found in the Lancelot of Sir Thomas Malory's romances and of Mr. Tennyson's poems. Of such a man we should have the right to expect that if he ever was a penitent, his sorrow would be very deep and bitter, and his humility most genuine. So was it, in fact, with Lancelot. For nearly seven years he did great penance for his sins, and suffered such remorse as could not be relieved by any "comfort that the bishop, nor Sir Bors, nor none of all his fellowes could make him." And when at last he died, there was a wondrous joy of angels over him, as "over one sinner that repenteth," for he had become as had been prophesied "a full holy man." He outlived both the king and queen; but after the death of Guinevere he lingered in much pain and weariness of body and of soul, not mourning for the loss of his old "rejoyceing of sinne," but piously repenting of his own "presumption and pride," and of his great ingratitude to God and to his king. And finally, one day his comrades found his "carefull body" lying lifeless on his bed, and noticed that "hee lay as hee had smiled." The subject of the fourth Idyl is the discovery of this guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere,-the awful remorse and penitence of the queen, and the sublime and mighty sorrow of the king. Here, again, Mr. Tennyson has simplified and condensed the story so that it becomes more manageable for poetry, and perhaps more impressive in its power. We have not space to dwell upon it. We cannot more than mention the exquisite skill with which the incidents of the sad story are arranged, and the scenery of it managed. Nowhere else in the volume is the poetry so passionate, and so sublime as here. Nowhere else in all that Mr. Tennyson has written is there such life, such fire, as lives and burns in the description of the interview of Arthur with his queen. The tone of the preceding Idyls is comparatively quiet, if we except some parts of "Vivien :" but here is the expression of a passionate emotion far more intense than any words can utter, but which, by some mysterious power, is made to live even in the very sound and rythm of the verse, and to excite in those who read it a wonderfully sorrowful and pitying sympathy. We cannot forbear to call attention to the power with which the character of Arthur,-which until now was somewhat hidden in the background of the other stories, though we have caught continual glimpses of its majesty,-is made to blaze forth suddenly with such a glory and a beauty that it fairly startles one. In a somewhat similar way, the queen, who until now has seemed to be little more than a jealous, sullen, passionate beauty, is made by her repentance to be full of most attractive. loveliness. Equally noteworthy and singularly true is the distinction which the poet makes between the queen's remorse and her sincere repentance. For when she left the court, and, to the holy house at Almesbury, "Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald, And heard the spirits of the waste and weald, even then, in her despair, she felt a bitter shame, and was all wrapt in black remorse. How men would scorn her, how disgraced she was,-how bitterly the realm, on which her sin had brought "Red ruin and the breaking up of laws," would hate her, and how all her love of Lancelot was at an end forever, these were the thoughts that filled her mind and crushed her down in tearless and in hopeless misery. But not yet was she penitent. Not even when she tried, a little afterward, to stifle her remorse and calm her conscience by the thought that she had put upon herself the penance not "in thought Not ev'n in inmost thought to think again The sins that made the past so pleasant to us : To see him more,"— not even then did she repent, for still she loved him with a guilty love no self-inflicted penance could atone for: and, even in that very act of penance, all her memory went back, in guilty longings and regrets, to those same passionate days which now were come to such a bitter ending. But when the King had come to Almesbury, and found her there in her remorse and shame, and showed her all her sin and all the woe and ruin she had caused, and yet forbore to cast against her the reproaches which she well deserved, and curse her with the curse which she had brought on others; when, with a soul all filled with manly sorrow and with pitying love, he gave to her his full and free forgiveness, harder to be borne than any scorn or curse; when he spake to her of true repentance, and of a hope that yet might be fulfilled when this unstable world had passed away; and when, although he loved her still, he would not bring her forth again to fill the throne she had disgraced, but left her with a pure and tender and most passionate and last farewell, and with a silent blessing, then the queen repented. Then, at last, she saw the loveliness of purity and goodness: then her mind and soul were changed, and she loved Lancelot no longer, but clave with all her being unto Arthur. This was something different from penance, and sublimer than remorse. There was hope in it, and faith. Her sorrow was not less, but it was purer. Her shame was not less deep and self-condemning, but it was holier. She fixed her thoughts, now, on "that world where all are pure," and on the day when she herself should stand "cleansed and forgiven before high God." In such a spirit does she humbly ask to join the sisterhood of nuns,-to fast and grieve and pray and labor with them, hoping not for joy, on earth, but only to 66 wear out in almsdeed and in prayer The sombre close of that voluptuous day, Which wrought the ruin of my lord the king." It is impossible to convey, by any analysis or by mere quotations, a just impression of the beauty and the power of this great poem. There is a sublimity and a tenderness in it that can be felt, but not described nor wholly explained. The value of the truths which it enforces is not easily to be overestimated. There are few poets who have set forth more impressively the beauty of a true repentance, and the splendor of a true forgiveness. We need only add that in this Idyl, more than in the others, Mr. Tennyson's own genius has supplied the incidents and details of the story. In all the volume there is nothing fresher and more picturesque and vivid than the episode in which the little novice tells the story of her father's ride from Lyonness, when the round table was founded, and of the joy and the exultant hope which lived among "spirits and men Before the coming of the sinful queen." And the introduction of this episode is only one instance of how much we owe to Mr. Tennyson, beyond what the old legends would have furnished. We have left ourselves but little space to speak of the volume as a whole, and of some peculiar characteristics of the poetry. It will be enough to say, in general, that most of the great excellencies of style, by which the author's former poems are distinguished, are found here also, and some of them in a greater degree than heretofore. There is something of the same terseness of expression and condensation of thought that we find in "Locksley Hall," for instance. The verse seems cram |