Where the crystal streams ran in the City of Gold.”
Better to people it with the phantoms of Arthur’s Court than to discover that the cavemen of the Mendips made it an abode. “The people can telle nothing ther, but that they have hard say that Arture much resorted to Camalot,” wrote Leland, and that suffices. Camelot is purely ideal, and it is enough to find a real Camelot which faintly recalls the place which Arthur’s eulogists deemed fitting for his Court. Such cities, which had no beginning, have no end, and Camelot will last as long, and prove as indestructible, as Fairyland itself.
“The thrushes sang in the lone garden there—
Clanging of arms about pavilion fair,
Mixed with the knights’ laughs; there, as I well know,
Rode Lancelot, the king of all the band,
And scowling Gawaine, like the night in day,
And handsome Gareth, with his great white hand
Curl’d round the helm-crest, ere he join’d the fray.”