Your fly will serve as well as anybody, And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies, And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance; And then your spider gets him in her net, And eats him out and hangs him up to dry. That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all. And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom, And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature, also. It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing. It’s all a world where bugs and emperors Go singularly back to the same dust, Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars That sang together, Ben, will sing the same Old stave tomorrow. And in his great flight into legend, in _Merlin_ and _Lancelot_, Mr. Robinson elected to view a crumbling order from angles which seem opposite enough but which both exhibit Camelot as a city broken by frailties which on other occasions might be heroic virtues: Merlin follows love to Vivien’s garden at Broceliande and the kingdom of Arthur falls to ruin because it has no strong, wise man to uphold it; Lancelot leaves love behind him to follow the Light, like a strong, wise man, but the Light dupes him as much as love has duped Merlin, and ruin overtakes Camelot none the less. This is Mr. Robinson’s reading of existence: We are all doomed men and we hasten to our ends according to some whimsy which establishes our hours soon or late, leaving us, however, the consolation of being perhaps able to perceive our doom and perhaps even to understand it.