are like clear waters grown stagnant.

254-255. FOR SO--GOD. The idea that the earth is bound by a gold chain
to heaven is comparatively common in literature from Homer downwards.
Archdeacon Hare has a passage in his sermon on _Self-Sacrifice_ which
doubtless was familiar to Tennyson: "This is the golden chain of love,
whereby the whole creation is bound to the throne of the Creator."

257-258. IF INDEED I GO--DOUBT. There is no reason to suppose that these
lines indicate Tennyson's personal misgivings on the subject of
immortality.

259. THE ISLAND VALLEY OF AVILION. Mr. Rhys in his _Studies in the
Arthurian Legend_ combats the old idea that Avalon (Avilion) meant the
"Island of Apples" (Welsh aval, apple). The name implies the Island of
King Avalon, a Celtic divinity, who presided among the dead.

The valley of Avalon was supposed to be near Glastonbury, in
Somersetshire, where Joseph of Arimathea first landed with the Holy Grail.

67 ff. There is an evident symbolical meaning in this dream. Indeed
Tennyson always appears to use dreams for purposes of symbol. The lines
are an application of the expression; "The old order changeth," etc. The
parson's lamentation expressed in line 18, "Upon the general decay of
faith," is also directly answered by the assertion that the modern Arthur
will arise in modern times. There is a certain grotesqueness in the
likening of King Arthur to "a modern gentleman of stateliest port." But
Tennyson never wanders far from conditions of his own time. As Mr.
Stopford Brooke writes; "Arthur, as the modern gentleman, as the modern
ruler of men, such a ruler as one of our Indian heroes on the frontier,