For what availed it, all the noise

And outcry of the former men?—
Say, have their sons achieved more joys,
Say, is life lighter now than then?
The sufferers died, they left their pain-
The pangs which tortured them remain.

What helps it now that Byron bore,

With haughty scorn which mocked the smart Through Europe to the Etolian shore

The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?

What boots it, Shelley! that the breeze
Carried thy lovely wail away,

Musical through Italian trees

Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay? Inheritors of thy distress,

Have restless hearts one throb the less?

Or are we easier to have read,

O Obermann! the sad, stern page,
Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head
From the fierce tempest of thine age
In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau,
Or châlets near the Alpine snow?

Ye slumber in your silent grave!-
The world, which for an idle day
Grace to your mood of sadness gave,
Long since hath flung her weeds away.
The eternal trifler breaks your spell;
But we- we learnt your lore too well!

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,

Which without hardness will be sage,

And gay without frivolity.

Sons of the world, oh, speed those years;

But while we wait, allow our tears!

A SUMMER NIGHT

N THE deserted, moon-blanched street,

IN

How lonely rings the echo of my feet!
Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,
Silent and white, unopening down,

Repellent as the world,

but see,

A break between the housetops shows
The moon! and lost behind her, fading dim
Into the dewy dark obscurity

Down at the far horizon's rim,
Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!

And to my mind the thought
Is on a sudden brought

Of a past night, and a far different scene:
Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep
As clearly as at noon;

The spring-tide's brimming flow
Heaved dazzlingly between;
Houses, with long wide sweep,
Girdled the glistening bay;

Behind, through the soft air,

The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.

That night was far more fair

But the same restless pacings to and fro,
And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,
And the same bright, calm moon.

And the calm moonlight seems to say:-
Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast,
Which neither deadens into rest,

Nor ever feels the fiery glow
That whirls the spirit from itself away,
But fluctuates to and fro,

Never by passion quite possessed

And never quite benumbed by the world's sway?—
And I, I know not if to pray

Still to be what I am, or yield, and be
Like all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,

With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,

Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem

The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

And the rest, a few,

Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart
Listeth will sail;

Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,

Trade-winds which cross it from eternity:
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves

The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning bursts is seen

Only a driving wreck,

And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair

Grasping the rudder hard,

Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.

And sterner comes the roar

Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave, must man be one?

Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!
Clearness divine!

Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign
Of languor, though so calm, and though so great
Are yet untroubled and unpassionate;

Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil,
And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!
I will not say that your mild deeps retain
A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain

Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain-
But I will rather say that you remain

A world above man's head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul's horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency!

How it were good to live there, and breathe free:
How fair a lot to fill

Is left to each man still!

L

THE BETTER PART

ONG fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,

How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!

"Christ," some one says, was human as we are:

No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;

We live no more when we have done our span.

"Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care ? From sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?

Live we like brutes our life without a plan !"

So answerest thou; but why not rather say,

"Hath man no second life?-Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven our sin to see?—

More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us?-Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!»

They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee?

Better men fared thus before thee;

Fired their ringing shot and passed,

Hotly charged- and sank at last.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,

Find thy body by the wall!

886

THE ARTHURIAN LEGENDS

(Eighth to Twelfth Centuries)

BY RICHARD JONES

OR nearly a thousand years, the Arthurian legends, which l

at the basis of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King,' have fur nished unlimited literary material, not to English poet alone, but to the poets of all Christendom. These Celtic romances having their birthplace in Brittany or in Wales, had been growing and changing for some centuries, before the fanciful Historia Bri tonum' of Geoffrey of Monmouth flushed them with color and fillet them with new life. Through the version of the good Benedictin they soon became a vehicle for the dissemination of Christian dog trine. By the year 1200 they were the common property of Europe influencing profoundly the literature of the Middle Ages, and becom ing the source of a great stream of poetry that has flowed without interruption down to our own day.

Sixty years after the 'Historia Britonum' appeared, and when the English poet Layamon wrote his 'Brut' (A. D. 1205), which was a translation of Wace, as Wace was a translation of Geoffrey, the theme was engrossing the imagination of Europe. It had absorbed into itselt the elements of other cycles of legend, which had grown up inde pendently; some of these, in fact, having been at one time of much greater prominence. Finally, so vast and so complicated did the body of Arthurian legend become, that summaries of the essential features were attempted. Such a summary was made in French about 1270, by the Italian Rustighello of Pisa; in German, about two centuries later, by Ulrich Füterer; and in English by Sir Thomas Malory in his 'Morte d'Arthur,' )finished "the ix. yere of the reygne of kyng Edward the Fourth," and one of the first books published in England by Caxton, "emprynted and fynysshed in th'abbey Westmestre the last day of July, the yere of our Lord MCCCCLXXXV." It is of interest to note, as an indication of the popularity of the Arthurian legends, that Caxton printed the 'Morte d'Arthur' eight years before he printed any portion of the English Bible, and fifty-three years before the complete English Bible was in print. He printed the 'Morte d'Arthur' in response to a general "demaund"; for "many noble and dyvers gentylmen of thys royame of England camen and demaunded me many and oftymes wherefore that I have not do make and enprynte the noble hystorye of the saynt greal, and of the moost