which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and
inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror is
touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons "in
earthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, Sweet
William's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, when
Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to
his mistress, True Thomas's ride to Fairyland, when:

"For forty days and forty nights,
He wade through red blood to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea."

The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed
down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural
wonder and enchantment. In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, Sir
Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is
only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and
a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad
sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine's
ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done
battle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fight
against Modred on a certain day. In the romance of _Sir Amadas_,
the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously
redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The
shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser's
fairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon dark
caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start
fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous