to walk apart, nevertheless, with flushing cheek and eyes cast down, while she listened to _his_ whispers, whose voice was softer and sweeter than fairy music in her ears! Could she but have known then where to seek her happiness and find it! Alas! that we see things so differently in different lights and surroundings—in serge and velvet, in the lustre of revelry and the pale cold grey of dawn, in black December frosts and the rich glow of June. Alas for us, that so seldom, till too late to take our bearings and avoid impending shipwreck, can we make use of that fearful gift described by another great poet as “The telescope of truth, Which strips the distance of its fantasies, And brings life near, in utter nakedness, Making the cold reality too real!” but still _reality_, and, as such, preferable to all the baseless visions of fancy, all the glitter and glamour and illusion of romance. We mortals must have our dreams; doubtless it is for a good purpose that they are so fair and sweet, that their duration is so short, the waking from them so bitter and forlorn. But at last most of us find ourselves disenchanted, weary, hopeless, memory-haunted, and seeking sanctuary after all, like Guinevere, when Lancelot had gone “Back to his land, but she to Almesbury Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald, And heard the spirits of the waste and weald Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan,— And in herself she moaned—‘Too late! too late!’” What a picture of desolation and despair! Mocking phantoms all about her, now gibing, now pitying, now goading her to the recklessness of despair. Before her, darkness uncheered by a single beacon; behind her, the sun of life and love gone down to rise no more, and, lifting helpless, hopeless eyes above, “A blot in heaven, the raven flying high.” Deep must be the guilt for which such hours as these are insufficient to atone! But the queen’s penance hath only just begun, for the black drop is not yet wrung out of her heart, and even in her cloister at Almesbury it is remorse rather than repentance that drives the iron into her soul. As it invariably does in moments of extreme feeling, the master-passion takes possession of her once more, and “my Lancelot” comes back in all his manly beauty and his devoted tenderness, so touching and so prized, that for him, too, it must make the sorrow of a lifetime. Again, she sees him in the lists, best, bravest, and knightliest lance of all the Round Table. Again, sitting fair and courtly and gentle among dames in hall, his noble face none the less winsome, be sure, to _her_, for that she could read on it the stamp of sorrow set there by herself as her own indelible seal. 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.