238 CAEMINOW OF CAEMINOW. 



Our poet Laiireate shall describe tlie scene of his last battle. 



The King 

 Made at the man : then Modred smote his liege 

 Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword 

 Had beaten thin ; while Arthtir at one blow, 

 Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, 

 Slew him, and all but slain himself he fell. 

 So all day long the noise of battle roU'd 

 Among the mountains by the winter sea ; 

 Until King Arthur's table, man by man, 

 Had fall'n in Lyonesse about their lord. 

 King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, 

 The bold Sir Bedivere uj)lifted him, 

 And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, 

 A broken chaacel 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 — ' 



Tennyson's ^'Passing of Arthur.'' 



And if we follow the Poet's fancy of the barge receding into 

 distance, as it bears King Arthur to his destiny, and watch it 

 ' pass on and on and go from less to less and vanish into light/ 

 we shall surely feel persuaded that the waters of the west on 

 which the Knights of Carminow more recently looked down 

 from their moated chamber, are the only western waters that will 

 satisfy the poet's dream. 



For if it be objected by the sceptic that the condition of the 

 "long water opening on the deep somewhere far off," is absent 

 here, we answer that the waters of the Loe once opened on the 

 deep Atlantic, before the present bar of shingle closed its mouth, 

 and why not in King Arthur's time ? 



