“By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody ‘stronger and statelier.’ He celebrated the glory of ‘human love and of human heroism’ and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of King Arthur, ‘typifying above all things the life of man,’ wherein he had intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor in the Gleam that had ‘waned to a wintry glimmer.’ Clouds and darkness Closed upon Camelot; Arthur had vanish’d I knew not whither, The King who loved me, And cannot die. “Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the Arthur ‘the man he held as half divine.’ He himself had fought with death, and had come out victorious to find ‘a stronger faith his own,’ and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human kind, that never forsook him through the future years. And broader and brighter The Gleam flying onward, Wed to the melody, Sang thro’ the world. * * * I saw, wherever In passing it glanced upon Hamlet or city, That under the Crosses The dead man’s garden, The mortal hillock, Would break into blossom; And so to the land’s Last limit I came. “Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the mystery of the Infinite. I can no longer, But die rejoicing, For thro’ the Magic Of Him the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood, There on the border Of boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven Hovers the Gleam. “That is the reading of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I might do.”