PRELUDE TO PART FIRST 2

OVER his keys the musing organist, Beginning doubtfully and far away, First lets his fingers wander as they list, And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay:

Then, as the touch of his loved instrument Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his

theme,

First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent
Along the wavering vista of his dream.
Not only around our infancy
Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; 10
Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,
We Sinais climb and know it not. 4

Over our manhood bend the skies;

Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies;

3

With our faint hearts the mountain strives;

Its arms outstretched, the druid wood
Waits with its benedicite;

1 According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus partook of the Last Supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word, and deed; but one of the keepers having broken this condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a favorite enterprise of the knights of Arthur's court to go in search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most exquisite of his poems.

The plot (if I may give that name to anything so slight) of the following poem is my own, and, to serve its purposes, I have enlarged the circle of competition in search of the miraculous cup in such a manner as to include, not only other persons than the heroes of the Round Table, but also a period of time subsequent to the supposed date of King Arthur's reign. (LOWELL.) 2 Holmes begins a poem of welcome to Lowell on his return from England:

This is your month, the month of perfect days.' June was indeed Lowell's month. Not only in the famous passage of this Prelude,' but in Under the Willows' (originally called 'A June Idyl'), 'Al Fresco (originally A Day in June '), 'Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line' of the Biglow Papers, and The Nightingale in the Study,' he has made it peculiarly his

own.

3 Heaven lies about us in our Infancy! (WORDSWORTH, in the fifth stanza of the Ode: Intimations of Immortality.')

See Lowell's letter, of Sunday, September 3, 1848, to his friend C. F. Briggs.

The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year,
And the very leaves seemed to sing on the
trees:

The castle alone in the landscape lay
Like an outpost of winter, dull and gray:
'T was the proudest hall in the North
Countree,

And never its gates might opened be,
Save to lord or lady of high degree;
Summer besieged it on every side,
But the churlish stone her assaults defied;
She could not scale the chilly wall,
Though around it for leagues her pavilions
tall

Stretched left and right,
Over the hills and out of sight;

Green and broad was every tent,
And out of each a murmur went
Till the breeze fell off at night.

121

The drawbridge dropped with a surly clang,
And through the dark arch a charger sprang,
Bearing Sir Launfal, the maiden knight, 130
In his gilded mail, that flamed so bright
It seemed the dark castle had gathered all
Those shafts the fierce sun had shot over

its wall

Last night... I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page's evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in Sir Launfal was drawn from it. But why do I send you this description - like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends. (LOWELL, to Briggs, in a letter of December, 1848, just after the publication of Sir Launfal. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

Within the hall are song and laughter, The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter

With lightsome green of ivy and holly; Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide

Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;
The broad flame-pennons droop and flap
And belly and tug as a flag in the wind;
Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death in its galleries blind; 220
And swift little troops of silent sparks,
Now pausing, now scattering away as in
fear,

Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks
Like herds of startled deer.

For another heir in his earldom sate;
An old, bent man, worn out and frail,
He came back from seeking the Holy Grail;
Little he recked of his earldom's loss,
No more on his surcoat was blazoned the
cross,

But deep in his soul the sign he wore,
The badge of the suffering and the poor.

III

Sir Launfal's raiment thin and spare
Was idle mail 'gainst the barbèd air,
For it was just at the Christmas time; 260
So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime,
And sought for a shelter from cold and

snow

In the light and warmth of long-ago;
He sees the snake-like caravan crawl
O'er the edge of the desert, black and
small,

Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,
He can count the camels in the sun,
As over the red-hot sands they pass
To where, in its slender necklace of grass,
The little spring laughed and leapt in the
shade,

270

And with its own self like an infant played, And waved its signal of palms.

IV

'For Christ's sweet sake, I beg an alms;' The happy camels may reach the spring, But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing,

The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone, That cowers beside him, a thing as lone

And white as the ice-isles of Northern

seas

In the desolate horror of his disease.

V

And Sir Launfal said, 'I behold in thee 280
An image of Him who died on the tree;
Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns,
Thou also hast had the world's buffets and
scorns,

And to thy life were not denied
The wounds in the hands and feet and side:
Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me;
Behold, through him, I give to thee!'

VI

Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes

And looked at Sir Launfal, and straightway he

Remembered in what a haughtier guise 290
He had flung an alms to leprosie,
When he girt his young life up in gilded
mail

And set forth in search of the Holy Grail.
The heart within him was ashes and dust;
He parted in twain his single crust,
He broke the ice on the streamlet's brink,
And gave the leper to eat and drink,
'Twas a mouldy crust of coarse brown
bread,

Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound:
'The Grail in my castle here is found!
Hang my idle armor up on the wall,
Let it be the spider's banquet-hall;
He must be fenced with stronger mail
Who would seek and find the Holy Grail.'

X

The castle gate stands open now,

And the wanderer is welcome to the
hall

As the hangbird is to the elm-tree bough;
No longer scowl the turrets tall,
The Summer's long siege at last is o'er;
When the first poor outcast went in at the
door,

340

She entered with him in disguise,
And mastered the fortress by surprise;
There is no spot she loves so well on
ground,

She lingers and smiles there the whole year round;

The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land
Has hall and bower at his command;
And there's no poor man in the North
Countree

But is lord of the earldom as much as he.

1848.

1848.