"Built by old kings, age after age,
So strange and rich and dim."
All we see of kings, and magicians, and ladies, and knights is "strange
and rich and dim." Over everything is a luminous haze. There are
"hollow tramplings up and down,
And muffled voices heard, and shadows past."
There is the flashing of swords, the weaving of spells, the seeing of
visions. All these things become real to us; not simply the stainless
king and the sinful queen, the prowess of Lancelot and the love of
Elaine, but the magic of Merlin and the sorceries of Vivien, with her
charms
"Of woven paces and of waving hands."
And we must stand at last with King Arthur on the shore of the mystic
sea, and see the barge come slowly with the three queens, "black-stoled,
black-hooded, like a dream;" and hear across the water a cry,
"As it were one voice, an agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world."
But what good is there in all this? Why waste time on idle dreams? We
hear Walt Whitman's challenge to romantic poetry:--
"Arthur vanished with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot
and Galahad, all gone, dissolved utterly like an exhalation;
Embroidered, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous
legends, myths,
Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and
courtly dames,
Passed to its charnel vault, coffined with crown and armor on,
Blazoned with Shakspere's purple page
And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme."