“’Ah! my Lord Arthur, wither shall I go?  Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?  For now I see the true old times are dead. . . . . . .  And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”

Mournfully from the barge Arthur answered and bade him pray, for “More things are wrought by prayer than the world dreams of,” and so he said farewell,

            “and the barge with oar and sail
    Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan.”

Long stood Sir Bedivere thinking of all that had come and gone, watching the barge as it glided silently away, and listening to the wailing voices,

“till the hull
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.”

Sir Bedivere turned then and climbed,

    “Ev’n to the highest he could climb, and saw,
    Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
    Or thought he saw, the speck that bore the King,
    Down that long water opening on the deep
    Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
    From less to less and vanish into light. 
    And the new sun rose bringing the new year.”

The poem moves along with mournful stately measures, yet it closes, like Layamon’s farewell to Arthur, on a note of hope.  Layamon recalls Merlin’s words, “the which were sooth, that an Arthur should yet come the English to help.”  The hope of Tennyson is different, not that the old will return, but that the new will take its place, for “the old order changeth yielding place to new, and God fulfils himself in many ways.”  The old sorrows vanish “into light,” and the new sun ever rises bringing in the new year.

BOOKS TO READ

    Idylls of the King, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, (Macmillan).

Chapter X THE ADVENTURES OF AN OLD ENGLISH BOOK

The story of Arthur has led us a long way.  We have almost forgotten that it began with the old Cymric stories, the stories of the people who lived in Britain before the coming of the Romans.  We have followed it before the coming of the Romans.  We have followed it down through many forms:  Welsh, in the stories of The Mabinogion; Latin, in the stories of Geoffrey of Monmouth; French, in the stories of Wace and Map; Semi-Saxon, in the stories of Layamon; Middle English, in the stories of Malory; and at last English as we now speak it, in the stories of Tennyson.  Now we must go back and see why it is that our Literature is English, and why it is that we speak English, and not Gaelic, or Cymric, or Latin, or French.  And then from its beginnings we will follow our English Literature through the ages.

Since historical times the land we now call England has been conquered three times, for we need hardly count the Danish Invasion.  It was conquered by the Romans, it was conquered by the English, and it was conquered by the Normans.  It was only England that felt the full weight of these conquests.  Scotland, Ireland, and, in part, Wales were left almost untouched.  And of the three it was only the English conquest that had lasting effects.