tations. Arthur had his. Lack of
sprightliness was his mistake and lack. But the work to be done fills
him with might unapproachable, so that,

"Like fire, he meets the foe,
And strikes him dead for thine and thee."

He is no play soldier, and foemen mark his sword as a thing to fear. A
mutilated herdsman, rushing into Caerlaen, and shaking bloody story
from his hideous wounds, which, Arthur hearing, though a tourneyment
would blow its bugles on the plain erelong, forgets the coming joust,
remembering only a wrong to be avenged, and evil-doers to be punished
or destroyed, so they may no longer be a noxious presence in the land,
and goes, and at tourney's close comes back, through the dark night,
wet with rain; but he has cleansed the hostile land of villains on that
day. In human nature is a bias to escape the world, to get out of the
turmoil, to seek cloisters of quiet, which bias "The Holy Grail"
attacks. Arthur was no friend to the pursuit of the grail; not that he
loves not, with a passion white as sun's flame, the good and pure, but
that he has sagacity to see such quest will scatter the round table and
its fellowship, and would dispeople his forces, whose presence makes
for peace and sovereignty in all his realm and compels the sovereignty
of law. Him, their king, these errant knights heeded not, so enticing
and noble seemed the warfare they espoused, and thought their sovereign
cold and calculating, while, in fact, he knew them for visionaries. He
was right. Without them he was bankrupt in strength to compel social
betterment. The visionary, in so far as he is simply visionary, is foe
to progress; for progress comes by battle and by association in
affairs, and he who would be helper to the better life of man must mix
with the currents of his time. Snowdrifts in the mountains and on the
northern slopes that hold snows in their shadows for the summer's use;
and dark mountain meadows, where fogs and rains soak every particle of
sod, and waters percolate through the spongy root and soil to form
bubbling streams; and the pines, whose shadows make a cool retreat
where streams may not be drained dry by the sun; the silver threads of
tributary brooks; the sponge of mountain mosses, which squeezes its cup
of water into a larger laver,--all these seem remote from the broad
river on whose flood merchants' fleets are slumbering, nor seem
participants with these floodgates to the sea; yet are they adju