"Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks: 'What hast thou seen, what heard?' Bedivere answers:
"'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag,'
"--lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns that I never stand in solitude beside their waters but I hear the verses in my heart. At the last he throws it.
"The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea.
"'So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur,' and never yet in poetry did any sword, flung in the air, flash so superbly.
"The rest of the natural description is equally alive, and the passage where the sound echoes the sense, and Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs as he moves among the icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting, clashing sound as any to be found in Tennyson:
"Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rung Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.
"We hear all the changes on the vowel _a_--every sound of it used to give the impression--and then, in a moment, the verse runs into breadth, smoothness and vastness: for Bedivere comes to the shore and sees the great water;
"And on a sudden lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon,
"in which the vowel _o_, in its changes is used, as the vowel _a_ has been used before.
"The questions and replies of Arthur and Bedivere, the reproaches of the King, the excuses of the Knight, the sorrow and the final wrath of Arthur, are worthy of the landscape, as they ought to be; and the dominance of the human element in the scene is a piece of noble artist-work. Arthur is royal to the close, and when he passes away with the weeping Queens across the mere, unlike the star of the tournament he was of old, he is still the King. Sir Bedivere, left alone on the freezing shore, hears the King give his last message to the world. It is a modern Christian who speaks, but the phrases do not sound out of harmony with that which might be in Romance. Moreover, the end of the saying is of Avilion or Avalon--of the old heathen Celtic place where the wounded are healed and the old made young."