With rosy colours leaping on the wall;
And then the music faded, and the Grail
Past, and the beam decay'd, and from the walls
The rosy quiverings died into the night.
So now the Holy Thing is here again
Among us, brother, fast thou too and pray,
And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray,
That so perchance the vision may be seen
By thee and those, and all the world be heal'd."


Galahad, son of Lancelot and the first Elaine (who became Lancelot's
mistress by art magic), then vows himself to the Quest, and, after
the vision in hall at Camelot, the knights, except Arthur, follow his
example, to Arthur's grief. "Ye follow wandering fires!" Probably,
or perhaps, the poet indicates dislike of hasty spiritual
enthusiasms, of "seeking for a sign," and of the mysticism which
betokens want of faith. The Middle Ages, more than many readers
know, were ages of doubt. Men desired the witness of the senses to
the truth of what the Church taught, they wished to see that naked
child of the romance "smite himself into" the wafer of the Sacrament.
The author of the Imitatio Christi discourages such vain and too
curious inquiries as helped to rend the Church, and divided
Christendom into hostile camps. The Quest of the actual Grail was a
knightly form of theological research into the unsearchable;
undertaken, often in a secular spirit of adventure, by sinful men.
The poet's heart is rather with human things:-


"'O brother,' ask'd Ambrosius,--'for in sooth