Again she tastes the bitter torture of their parting agony, and her very spirit longs only to be released that it may fly to him for ever, far away in his castle beyond the sea.
This, with true dramatic skill, is the moment chosen by the poet for the arrival of her injured, generous, and forgiving lord—
“While she brooded thus,
And grew half guilty in her thoughts again,
There rode an armed warrior to the doors.”
And now comes that grand scene of sorrow and penitence and pardon, for which this poem seems to me unequalled and alone.
Standing on the brink of an uncertainty more ghastly than death, for something tells him that he is now to lead his hosts in his last battle, and that the unearthly powers to whom he owes birth, fame, and kingdom, are about to reclaim him for their own, he stretches the hands of free forgiveness, as it were, from the other world.
How short, in the face of doom so imminent, so inevitable, appears that span of life, in which so much has been accomplished! Battles have been fought, victories gained, a kingdom established, a bulwark raised against the heathen, an example set to the whole of Christendom, and yet it seems but yesterday
“They found a naked child upon the sands
Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea,