(p. 371), "we are close throughout to the ancient tale. No allegory, no
ethics, no rational soul, no preaching symbolism, enter here, to dim,
confuse, or spoil the story. Nothing is added which does not justly
exalt the tale, and what is added is chiefly a greater fulness and
breadth of humanity, a more lovely and supreme Nature, arranged at every
point to enhance into keener life the human feelings of Arthur and his
knight, to lift the ultimate hour of sorrow and of death into nobility.
Arthur is borne to a chapel nigh the field--

"A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land;
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

"What a noble framework--and with what noble consciousness it is drawn! .
. . . All the landscape--than which nothing better has been invented by
any English poet--lives from point to point as if Nature herself had
created it; but even more alive than the landscape are the two human
figures in it--Sir Bedivere standing by the great water, and Arthur lying
wounded near the chapel, waiting for his knight. Take one passage, which
to hear is to see the thing:

"So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept,
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang
Shrill, chill with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.