ing emotions of a lover
who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger,
he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but
he sees Maud's face no more. While the poem as a whole is not a
masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics. The eleven
stanzas of the lover's song to Maud, the--

"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls,"

are such an exquisite blending of woodbine spice and musk of rose, of
star and daffodil sky, of music of flute and song of bird, of the soul
of the rose with the passion of the lover, of meadows and
violets,--that we easily understand why Tennyson loved to read these
lines.

The Idylls of the King.--In 1859 Tennyson published _Lancelot and
Elaine_, one of a series of twelve _Idylls_, the last of which
appeared in 1855. Together these form an epic on the subject of King
Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Tennyson relied mainly on
Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ for the characters and the stories.

These _Idylls_ show the struggle to maintain noble ideals. Arthur
relates how he collected--

"In that fair order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time."

He made his knights swear to uphold the ideals of his court--

"To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And warship her by years of noble deeds
Until they won her."

The twelve _Idylls_ have as a background those different seasons of
the year that accord with the special mood of the story. In _Gareth
and Lynette_, the most interesting of the _Idylls_, the young hero
leaves his home in spring, when the earth is joyous with birds and
flowers. In the last and most nobly poetic of the series, _The Passing
of Arthur_, the time is winter, when the knights seem to be clothed
with their own frosty breath.

Sin creeps into King Arthur's realm and disrupts the order of the
"Table Round." He receives his mortal wound, and passes to rule in a
kindlier realm that welcomed him as "a king returning from the wars."

Although the _Idylls of the King_ are uneven in quality and sometimes
marred by overprofusion of ornament and by deficiency of dramatic
skill, their limpid style, many fine passages of poetry, appealing