And here it is that the character of Arthur, as drawn by Tennyson, exemplifies the noblest type of Christianity, chivalry, and manhood with which we are acquainted in the whole range of fiction. Poetry has yet to disclose to us a more godlike, more elevating sentiment than the king’s pardon to his guilty and repentant wife. It breathes the very essence of all those qualities which humanity, at best “a little lower than the angels,” is ever striving unsuccessfully to attain. There is courage, abiding by the award of its own conscience, and appealing to a higher tribunal than the verdict of its kind; there is contempt for consequences; there is scrupulous, unswerving persistence in the path of duty, such as constitutes the soldier and the hero; there is large-hearted, far-seeing benevolence, that weighs its own crushed happiness and blighted life but as dust in the balance against the well-being of its fellows. Above all, there is that grand trust in a better world and an immortal identity, without which man, despite his strength of will and pride of intellect, were little superior to the beasts of the field. Such is the diapason, so to speak, of this mighty march of feeling—the march of an unconquered spirit and a kingly soul; while through it all, ever present, though ever modulated and kept down, runs the wild, mournful accompaniment, the wail of a kindly, tortured heart, of a love that can never die—
“And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vext with thee,
In hanging robe—or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair.
For think not, though thou wouldst not love thy lord,
Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee.
I am not made of such slight elements.
Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame.”