The poet, fallen on the grassy grave of the lost child, lies entranced, but his spirit floats forth to a strange land of cliffs and woods, where the leaves shine as burnished silver, and birds of strange hues float and sing. He comes to a river crystal-clear, whose pearls glow like sapphire and emerald, but that river has no ford, and may not be crossed by living man. On the farther shore he sees a maiden clad in white and in pearls, fresh as a fleur-de-lis; she is the Blessed Damosel, the Lady Pearl. Her locks are golden, and her crown is of pearls and gold. She tells the dreamer that she is not lost: his Pearl is in a coffer; safely set in the garden of Paradise. She comforts him with the hope and comfort of Christ. Henceforward her discourse is religious: he strives to cross that River, and to reach the shining city of the Apocalypse; but he wakes on the grave of his child; and consoles himself with the promise of the Communion of the Saints. The machinery of the Dream, and the River, are borrowed (as all poets then borrowed), from the famous French "Roman de la Rose" (1240) with its allegorical characters. This fashion of poetry, always beginning with a dream, in which the dreamer has visionary adventures with allegorical personages, became a kind of literary epidemic, terribly tedious and conventional, as time went on. The poet has given to his lay the charm of sorrow not without hope, and a dainty grace of artifice that is not insincere; "of his tears are pearls made". As to the author of "Pearl," there is much difference of opinion. Nothing in the two edifying poems in the same manuscript, "Cleanness" and "Patience," makes it improbable that he wrote them. "Gawain and the Green Knight" is a very different composition, yet of lofty character; the author of "Pearl" may have written it, just as the author of "The Lotus Eaters" wrote "The Northern Farmer," and "The Charge of the Light Brigade". Huchown. With a number of other poems, "Pearl" has been claimed for a Scot, Huchown, Sir Hugh of Eglintoun, an Ayrshire laird, known as a fighting man, a diplomatist, and a judge, in the reign of David II of Scotland; he "flourished" between 1342 and 1377. Or perhaps Huchown was a priest, nobody knows. The process of argument is this; some forty-three years after Sir Hugh died, in 1420, a Scottish writer of history in rhyme, Wyntoun, produced his "Orygynale Cronykil" (his spelling is original enough). He says that "Huchown of the Awle Ryale," wrote learnedly, on the Brut and Arthur themes, in his "Geste Hystorialle," that is a rhymed romance named "Morte Arthur". Wyntoun also says that Huchown made the "Gret Gest off Arthure" (apparently the "Morte Arthur"), the "Awntyre off Gawaine" (perhaps "Gawain and the Green Knight," or perhaps the "Awntyrs of Arthur"), and the "Pystyll of Swete Susane" (a poem still extant, on Susannah and the Elders, the story in the Apocrypha).