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, And that was Arthur.” Now in the height of glory, in the fulfilment of duty, in the prime of manhood, such sorrows have overtaken him, as must needs whisper their prophetic warning that his task is done, and it is time to go. _Where_, he sees not, cares not. True to himself and his knighthood, he is ready now, as always, to follow the path of honour, wherever it may lead, and meet unflinching “Death, or I know not what mysterious doom.” Arthur, dethroned, ruined, heart-broken, mortally wounded, and unhorsed, will be no less Arthur than when on Badon Hill he stood “High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume, Red as the rising sun with heathen blood,” and shouted victory with a great voice in the culminating triumph of his glory. [Illustration: “‘We two may meet before high God.’” _Bones and I._] [_Page 257_ ] For him, too, at this supreme moment the master-passion asserts its sway, and even that great soul thrills to its centre with the love that has been wasted for half a lifetime on her who is only now awaking to a consciousness of its worth. He cannot leave her for ever without bidding farewell to his guilty queen. So riding through the misty night to the convent where she has taken refuge, he looks his last in this world on her from whom in his great loyalty of affection neither her past disgrace nor his own approaching death shall part him for ever. With that instinct of pure love which clings to a belief in its eternity, he charges her to cleanse her soul with repentance and sustain her hopes with faith, that “Hereafter in that world where all are pure We two may meet before high God, and thou Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know I am thine husband.”