Kitabı oku: «The Lost Land of King Arthur», sayfa 4

 
“The deep forest glades of Broce-liand,
Through whose green boughs the golden sunshine creeps,
Where Merlin by the enchanted thorn-tree sleeps.”
 

Very cunningly and mystically has the poet told of Vivien’s guile as she waved a wimple over the blossom’d thorn-tree and the sleeping dotard, until within “a little plot of magic ground,” a “daisied circle,” Merlin was made prisoner till the judgment day. Celtic mythology, Renan tells us, is nothing more than a transparent naturalism, the love of nature for herself, the vivid impression of her magic, accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that man knows. When face to face with her, he believes that he hears her commune with him concerning his origin and destiny. “The legend of Merlin mirrors this feeling,” he continues. “Seduced by a fairy of the woods, he flies with her and becomes a savage. Arthur’s messengers come upon him as he is singing by a fountain; he is led back again to court, but the charm carries him away. He returns to his forests, and this time for ever.”

“La forêt de Brocelinde,” writes Emile Souvestre, in that fascinating and half-pathetic work, Les Derniers Bretons, “se trouve située dans le commune de Corcoret, arrondissement de Ploërmal. Elle est celebrée dans les romans de la table ronde. C’est là que l’on rencontre la fontaine de Baranton, le Val sans retour, la tombe de Merlin. On sait que ce magicien se trouve encore dans cette forêt, où il est retenu par les enchantements de Viviane à l’ombre d’un bois d’aubépine. Viviane avait essayé sur Merlin le charme qu’elle avait appris de lui-même, sans croire qu’il pût opérer; elle se desespéra quand elle vit qui celui qu’elle adorait était à jamais perdu pour elle.” This statement is not confirmed in the English romance, and is opposed wholly to the sentiment of the story as conceived by Tennyson and other modern writers. “On assure que Messire Gauvain (Gawain) et quelques chevaliers de la table ronde cherchèrent partout Merlin, mais en vain. Gauvain seul l’entendit dans la forêt de Brocelinde, mais ne put le voir.” The district of Brocelinde, or Brécéliande, is rich in antiquities, dolmens and menhirs being found together with other relics of early times and the mysterious workers of the stone age. To add to the scenic attractions of the locality there are ruined castles, the remains of machicolated walls, ancient chateaux, and churches dating back many centuries. It is fitting that here, therefore, romance should maintain one of its strongholds and that traditions of the master-magician should linger.

There is yet one other legend which should be noted. It represents the magician as perpetually roaming about the wood of Calydon lamenting the loss of the chieftains in the battle of Arderydd; while yet another tells of a glass house built for him in Bardsey Island by his companion, the Gleam, in which house of sixty doors and sixty windows he studied the stars, and was attended by one hundred and twenty bards to write down his prophecies. Never was such a confusion of traditions and fancies, never were so many deluding will-o’-the-wisps to lead astray whosoever would strive to investigate the truth of Merlin’s story. That story with its abundance of suggestion makes us think of the apt words of John Addington Symonds, who said that the examination of these mysterious narratives was like opening a sealed jar of precious wine. “Its fragrance spreads abroad through all the palace of the soul, and the noble vintage upon being tasted courses through the blood and brain with the matured elixir of stored-up summers.” One needs some such consolation as this for the vexation of finding seemingly inextricable confusion.

Warrior though he was, and all-powerful by reason of his supernatural gifts, Merlin is yet represented as being a peace-maker and as paying allegiance to a “master.” He ended the great battle between Arthur and the eleven kings, when the horses went in blood up to the fetlocks, and out of three-score thousand men but fifteen thousand were left alive. Of this sanguinary battle of Bedgraine, Merlin gave an account to his master Blaise, or Bleys, journeying to Northumberland specially to do so and to get the master to write down the record; all Arthur’s battles did Blaise chronicle from Merlin’s reports. Attempts have been made to identify Blaise (the Wolf) with St. Lupus, Bishop of Troyes. The more impressive part which Merlin plays in the Arthurian drama is as prophet and necromancer. His sudden comings and goings, his disguises, his solemn warnings, his potent interventions, all these combine to strengthen the idea of unequalled influence and of awesome personality. He figures prominently in the story of Sir Balin le Savage, and it was his hand which wrote the fitting memorial of the two noble brothers. Merlin it was again who counselled the king to marry, and who brought Guinevere to London from Cameliard, darkly predicting at the same time that through the queen Arthur should come to his doom.

An ancient Cornish song, to be found in the original dialect, but in reality a Breton incantation which has come down to us from the far ages out of the abundance of Armoric lore, describes Merlin the Diviner attended by a black dog and searching at early day for

 
“The red egg of the marine serpent,
By the seaside in the hollow of the stone.”
 

Asked whither he is going he responds:

 
“I am going to seek in the valley
The green watercress and the golden grass,
And the top branch of the oak,
In the wood by the side of the fountain.”
 

A warning voice bids him turn back and not to seek the forbidden knowledge. The cress, the golden grass, the oak branch, and the red egg of the marine serpent are not for him. “Merlin! Merlin!” cries the voice,

 
“Retrace thy steps,
There is no diviner but God.”
 

It is like a moral message from Goethe’s Faust.

There is no doubt that Merlin’s death, which is no death, but a blind grovelling and eternal uselessness, was the mark of scorn put upon the magician who might have been prepotent, but who prostituted his powers—a feebleness and a degradation which were intolerable to the sturdy race who prized courage above all other qualities, and were incapable of realising the meaning of defeat or despair. That the counsellor should himself turn fool, and that the man of supernatural gifts should be prone to the weakness of nature, would be obnoxious to the Celtic imagination, and have its sequel in ribald allusion and endless taunts. The disaster which overtakes Merlin is one fitting for the coward or the buffoon, and is a fate altogether foreign to the ancient idea of that which was fitting for the hero, the bard, or the sage. It is noticeable that all the former services of Merlin are forgotten in judging him upon the closing despicable episode in his career and consigning him to timeless indolence and impotence. Shorn of his strength, a prisoner, living but “lost to use and fame,” Mage Merlin in his cave, victim to his own folly and a woman’s wiles, awaits the last doom.

CHAPTER IV
OF TINTAGEL

 
“There is a place within
The winding Severne sea,
On mids of rock, about whose foote
The tydes turn, keeping play,
A tower-y toppèd castle here,
Wide blazeth over all,
Which Corineus’ ancient broode
Tintagel Castle call.”—Camden.
 

 
“Thou seest dark Cornwall’s rifted shore,
Old Arthur’s stern and rugged keep,
There, where proud billows dash and roar,
His haughty turret guards the deep.
 
 
“And mark yon bird of sable wing,
Talons and beak all red with blood,
The spirit of the long-lost king
Passed in that shape from Camlan’s flood.”
 

R. S. Hawker.

Cornwall, the horn-shaped land, far removed from the great centres of progress and industry, the land of giants, of a separate people who until the last century spoke its own language;¹⁵ the land of holy wells and saints, of hut circles, dolmens, and earthwork forts, memorials of extreme antiquity; the land of many stone crosses indicating the early influence of Christianity; the land of so-called giants’ quoits, chairs, spoons, punch-bowls, and mounds, sometimes the work of primitive man, sometimes the work of fantastic Nature—this is the land in which romance lingers and in which superstition thrives, the land upon which seems to rest unmoving the shadow of the past. Olden customs survive, the old fashion is not departed from. The quaintness, the simplicity, the quietude, the charm of a bygone age may be found yet in that part which Taylor, the water poet, described as “the compleate and repleate Home of Abundance, noted for high churlish hills, and affable courteous People.”

A tour through the land which romance has marked out for her own, and where the fords, bridges, hills, and rocks are called after Arthur or associated by tradition with his exploits, becomes easier every year by the development of railways, little known in the wilder parts until a decade or so ago. It must be sorrowfully confessed that the visit to Tintagel, despite its charm, results in a certain amount of disillusion. It contains no relic, nothing that can verily be imagined a relic, of the old, old times when the flower of chivalry ruled. As one walks down the solitary street and glances around he sees that Tintagel is an antique, picturesque little place with its quaint post-office of yore—battered by time, the roof fallen, and the stonework disjointed—with its stunted cottages, its typical village shop and hostelry, and its lonely church on the cliffs. Tintagel, as it is, is unique, but it is not Arthurian unless we go direct to those parts where Nature is not and never has been molested. The Pentargon heights, the great gorges, the weird bays and caves, the rock-strewn valleys, the imposing waterfalls—from these may be constructed the scenery for the drama of the warlike king and his adventurous knights. The huge bank of earth enclosing an oblong space, with its remnant of stone-lining found near St. Breavard, is fitly called King Arthur’s Hall. Such relics as are found in and near Tintagel are posterior to King Arthur’s era. There is a Saxon cross to be seen, erected to the memory of one Ælnat, a Saxon. A sybstel, or family pillar, with Saxon inscription, found in Lanteglos Church, near Camelford, and a Roman stone discovered in Tintagel churchyard, are ancient memorials of the highest interest. Relics of the bronze age have been discovered also, though the influence of the Phœnician tin-traders did not seemingly extend to this mid part of Cornwall.

Tintagel, as the first locality mentioned in the romance, has a special claim to attention: “It befell in the days of the noble Uther Pendragon, when he was King of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty and a noble Duke in Cornwalle that held long time wars against him; and the Duke was named the Duke of Tintagil.” So run the opening lines, introducing us at once to the western territory and to the rocky stronghold indissolubly linked with Arthur’s fame. Strange to say, however, the place is absolutely ignored in the later half of the history, despite the fact that Cornwall was the scene of some of the most important concluding events. Tintagel was apparently forgotten by the chroniclers after the story of Tristram was related, and the last mention of it as King Mark’s Castle, where treachery was followed by bloodshed, where the allegiance of the knights began to decline, and where folly, wantonness, and shame served as omens of coming disaster and of the impending shock to the realm which Arthur had made. The history of Tintagel begins in a tale of shame, though King Uther’s deceit of Igraine appears to have been regarded less as dishonour to himself than as a sign of his own and Merlin’s strategy and venturesomeness.¹⁶ Uther, having compassed the death of Gorlois, had no further difficulty in persuading Igraine to become his wife, and their son was Arthur, who at his birth was delivered to Sir Ector, “a lord of faire livelyhood,” to be nourished as one of his own family. The death of Uther while his son was yet an infant left the succession in some doubt, and in order to prove Arthur’s right to the crown the familiar device was adopted of drawing a sword from a stone. The scene of the contest in which Arthur, now assumed by the chroniclers to be a goodly youth, and Sir Ector’s son took part, is vaguely described as being “the churchyard of the greatest church in London”; and it is needless to say that only Arthur proved equal to the feat of pulling the sword from the marble and the steel anvil in which it stood. The letters of gold on the sword declared that “whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvile, is rightwise king borne of England,” and Sir Ector and Sir Kay, his defeated son and Arthur’s foster-brother, were the first to kneel to Arthur as their lord when they saw Excalibur in his hand. Before the lords and commons Arthur again proved his right and royalty at the feast of Pentecost, and with the help of Merlin he proceeded immediately to establish his kingdom, which, during Uther’s illness and after his death, had stood “in great jeopardie.”

Gorlois, the husband of Igraine, had been the possessor of two castles, Tintagel and Terabyl (or Damaliock), which may be judged to have been at no great distance from one another. Terabyl is untraceable, though it has been suggested that while Tintagel Castle was solely upon the peninsula (Barras Head) which juts into the sea, Terabyl was the castle upon the mainland. This theory is untenable. It is only in comparatively recent times, with the widening of the chasm between the peninsula and the mainland, that a division of any importance can be noticed; and it is safe to assume that there was never more than one castle at Tintagel. The rent in the rocks was spanned by a huge bridge, as the crenellated walls now reaching to the edge on either side and in a direct line with each other plainly attest. Terabyl, in which the Duke entrenched himself when Uther Pendragon brought his hosts against him, was evidently further inland than Tintagel, and the latter, distinctly avowed to be “ten miles hence,” was selected as the refuge for Igraine. Uther, marching southward from Camelot, reached Terabyl first and laid siege to it; to reach Igraine at Tintagel he had still to ride some distance. “The Duke of Tintagil espied how the king rode from the siege of Terrabil, and, therefore, that night he issued out of the castle at a posterne”—(Terabyl was noted for its “many issues and pasternes out”)—“for to have distressed the king’s host. And so, through his own issue, the Duke himself was slain or ever the king came at the castle of Tintagil.” Geoffrey of Monmouth calls Terabyl “castellum Dimilioc,” but under this name it is no less a mystery. As it receives incidental mention only twice afterwards we may well be content to rank Terabyl among the cities of romance, the names of which alone existed. It may have been as unsubstantial as the enchanted cities created by mysterious maidens for their courteous and faithful lovers, which cities vanished in a night if vows were broken or false words uttered.

It is said in some of the romances that twice a year the Castle of Tintagel became invisible to the eyes of the common people. To-day it is only in imagination that we can perceive the real castle of Arthur, for whatever British fortress may ever have risen on these heights has long since vanished—crumbled away into dust which is as nothingness. Authentic history takes us back only to the time of the Norman Conquest, when Tintagel was entered in Domesday Book as Dunchine, or Chain Castle. It is the firm opinion of archæologists that the Romans entrenched themselves here and left signs of their occupation, and there are the strongest reasons for believing that Tintagel was a British place of defence before the Roman invasion. Nature had marked out the rocky height as a stronghold, and a race like the Britons could scarcely have failed to avail themselves of all the advantages it offered. But when we first read of Tintagel Castle apart from the romances we find it in the occupation of English princes, notably of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, otherwise known as the King of the Romans, who in 1245 gave noble entertainment to his nephew, Prince of Wales, then carrying on a desperate war for freedom against the English king. The use of Tintagel as a prison from which escape was almost impossible was recognised from early times until the reign of Elizabeth, at which era it began to fall into decay; and it was within the loneliest and most exposed portion of the island that John Northampton, Lord Mayor of London, who had abused his office, was immured for life by order of Richard II. A sculptured moorstone, now moss-covered and illegible, commonly called the altar-stone of King Arthur’s Chapel, is believed in reality to be a monument of John Northampton’s own carving, wrought to pass away the dreary days in his dungeon, and now marking the place of his tomb. What is known as King Arthur’s Chapel is a spacious chamber fifty-four feet long and twelve feet wide, the outline of which is barely traceable. It is supposed to have been dedicated to Saint Uliane.

In Leland’s time Tintagel Castle was “sore wether-beten an yn ruine,” and whether it was ever the stronghold of Arthur history does not determine. The name was formerly Dundagil, meaning “the impregnable fortress,” and Geoffrey of Monmouth did not exaggerate when he wrote of it: “It is situated upon the sea, and on every side surrounded by it, and there is but one entrance into it, and that through a straight rock, which three men shall be able to defend against the whole of the kingdom.” Leland, less interested in the matter, testified that “the castelle hath bene a marvelus strong and notable forteres, and a large thinge.... Without the isle rennith alonly a gate-house, a walle, and a fals braye dyged and walled. In this isle remayne old walles, and in the est part of the same, the ground beying lower, remaynith a walle embateled, and men abyve saw thereyn a postern dore of yren.” The chronicler and antiquary Carew supplies further evidence of the strength of the structure. “The cyment,” he says, “wherewith the stones were laid, resisteth the fretting furie of the weather better than the stones themselves,” a fact which is strongly commented on also by Norden, who thought that “neither time nor force of hands could sever one from the other.” “Half the buildings,” continues Carew, “were raised on the continent (the mainland) and the other halfe on an island, continued together by a drawbridge, but now divorced by the downfalne steepe cliffes on the further side.” There is a consensus of opinion as to this drawbridge, Camden and other trustworthy historians all confirming the report as to its existence, and this further proves that there were not two castles at Tintagel.¹⁷ The gigantic impression of a foot is pointed out to credulous pilgrims; it is the print left by King Arthur’s foot when he strode across the chasm—backwards. This is as much to be relied upon as the fact that the basins worn by the winds and waves in the rocks were King Arthur’s cups and saucers, and that a dizzy dip of the heights over the sea constituted his chair. It is surprising that the immense and awe-inspiring caverns have escaped the fate of being called King Arthur’s drinking-bowls. Yet all these conceits have their value as proof of the deep-rooted belief in the king’s might as a monarch and his stupendous stature as a man. The hero is rapidly passing into the myth when such attributes are ascribed to him.

Tintagel must have been even more impressive a scene a few centuries ago than it is to-day, despite its wild sublimity in ruin. One more witness of old time may be called forth to give his evidence of what it was before the walls had been so buffeted and brought so low.

“A statelye and impregnable seate,” is Norden’s testimony, “now rent and rugged by force of time and tempests; her ruines testifye her pristine worth, the view whereof, and due observation of her situation, shape, and condition in all partes, may move commiseration that such a statelye pile should perish for want of honourable presence. Nature hath fortified, and art dyd once beautifie it, in such sorte as it leaveth unto this age wonder and imitation.” Tintagel is to be visited rather than described, though our most luxuriant poets have painted it with lavish richness of words, and artists have depicted some of its natural beauties in the most radiant of colours. From many a rocky verge can be seen the dark remnants of Arthur’s fortress, inaccessible on all sides but one; from the deep base the ocean spreads out without bound, surging and boiling and casting up steam-like fountains of hissing foam. Only a few arches and rude flights of steps, surmounted by a frail-looking wooden door, now remain, with some fallen walls which imperfectly outline the shape of what were once spacious royal chambers. On a carpet of turf wander the small mountain sheep, and pick their way about the narrow precipitous paths which wind around the jagged sides of the cliffs. The fortifications are in ruin, and the battlemented walls which encompassed the massive steeps are now nothing but disconnected strips over which the curious traveller looks into the angry waters grinding and regurgitating far below. The noble bridge which once stretched across the yawning chasm dividing the two promontories must alone be imagined, though its beginnings on each side may be traced by the line of low stone arches reaching, and stopping abruptly at, the edge. The hills “that first see bared the morning’s breast,” the heights “the sun last yearns to from the west,” as Swinburne has sung, are eternal, but Arthur’s castle has gone, and Tintagel, “half in sea and high on land, a crown of towers,” is even called by the dwellers no more by its old inspiring name.

The very mention of Cornish seas has an alluring sound, and one already feels in the realm of romance when he descries in the mellow light of an afternoon in late summer that smallest of villages perched upon a rock overlooking the bluest of seas with its perpetual fringe of powdery foam. Here at the edge of the Atlantic is a most beguiling stretch of water, filling innumerable bays—water so clear and calm and deep-hued far away that it is hard to realise that it makes a cruel and treacherous sea in which only on the gentlest of days dare a swimmer plunge and feel his way among the underlying rocks, or upon the roaring waves of which dare a hardy sailor venture his boat. In storm this sea is terrible. The waves upheave themselves like solid hillocks of water, black at the base, and hurl themselves with appalling force against the huge rocks, which have already been worn and broken by them into a thousand fantastic shapes. Here and there the propelling force of the incoming tide, working like a gigantic engine, sends with torrent-force along narrow open passages a seething stream which beats its way upward and dashes headlong over the barriers of wood and stone; and the great smoke-coloured waves beyond rear themselves heavily, topple, and crash down into the abyss with thunderous roaring. On they come, nearer and nearer, louder and louder, those hard, rising, climbing, dissolving bodies of incalculable strength, dashing themselves furiously over every obstacle, sweeping with a hiss across the tracts of sand, and obliterating the tall rocks which can be toilsomely climbed when the waters retreat. Beneath this raging, battering sea lies a fabled domain with all its fair cities and towers, and every watcher of those stupendous, merciless billows can realise their potentiality to tear away the land and drag it into the unseen deeps. Storm at Tintagel or Trebarwith is both revelation and conviction: it is a manifestation of remorselessness, a suggestion of irreparable ruin, desolation, and loss. Easy indeed is it to imagine that the treacherous and cruel waves driving rapaciously landward have already had their victory and are savagely seeking to extend their conquest, and that hereabout lie “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonnesse.”

No one has described this wildly beautiful sea with greater charm and realism than Swinburne, who has watched it in all moods, seen it in the blueness of calm, seen it strive and shiver “like spread wings of angels blown by the sun’s breath,” seen it when the glad exhilarated swimmer feels

 
“The sharp sweet minute’s kiss
Given of the wave’s lip, for a breath’s space curled
And pure as at the daytime of the world,”
 

—seen it again when the east wind made the water thrill, and the soft light went out of all its face, and the green hardened into iron blue. A walk from Camelford to Tintagel, passing Trebarwith, and on from Tintagel to Boscastle, passing Bossiney and many a smaller cove on the way, reveals the most wonderful and alluring of all changeful sea-pictures, and displays most vividly the marvel and magic of the rugged coast. The towering rocks have been wrought by time and carved by wind and wave into grotesque images, broken at the base into sunless caves, worn at the heights into sharp and gleaming pinnacles, fretted and cut, rounded and cracked, sundered and cast down, the massive blocks made veritably the sport of the elements, so that the beholder may easily believe himself in the realm of enchantment. All the sounding shores of Bude and Boss are legend-haunted. The mariner hears the chime and toll of the lost bells of Bottreaux when he comes within sight of the “silent tower,” which stands white and grim upon the headland. The wail of lured voyagers and the despairing lament of the smugglers who brought them with false lights to their doom are listened to in awe on stormy nights, and there are visions of good ships that went down among the rocks in the tragic desperate days of which so many ghastly tales are told. The last of the Cornish wreckers, for whom, when he lay dying, a ship with red sails came in a tremendous sea and bore him shrieking away, looms as an apparition on the darkest nights, and the cries of tormented spirits mingle with the blast. Merlin, with flowing beard, is said to pace the shore, and Arthur and his knights to revisit the scenes of their exploits. The spirit of the king hovers about sea and land in the form of the almost sacred chough, reverenced and preserved by the inhabitants that they may not unwittingly injure their hero. Further north at Bude Haven the long Atlantic breakers roll, and perhaps there is no more imposing spectacle than the coil of waves coming in upon the far-extending and rock-strewn sands. The undulations, miles long, seem to rise and curl far out at sea at short regular distances from each other, and mass upon mass they break with thunder-sound and cataract upon the shore. The most brilliant of sunsets glow in the perfect summer weather when day dies slowly over these “far-rolling, westward-smiling seas,” and they leave the night still radiant. The whole land is sweet and bright with flowers: on one side lies the glittering surf lacing itself in white foam about the boulders, and on the other side rises the circle of hills topped by the massy brown summits of Row Tor and Brown Willy. Sometimes the deserted quarries give a spectral look to the landscape, and when the rain spatters and darkens the piles of rough slate the aspect is weird and gloomy indeed. But given a day of sunshine when the sea is a sparkling emerald or the deepest of blues, when the sky is clear or only softened with diaphanous rings of cirrus-cloud, when the moss glistens on the rocks and the expanse of meadowland is a vivid carpet of green, when the winding hilly lanes flanked by tall hedges are white and shadowless, and the little tinkling runlets are silver gleams, and then this tract of Arthur’s Cornwall is almost the land of faerie which poets have sung.

What more fitting than that the grave of Tristram and Iseult should have been at Tintagel, where the sea they loved came with its strong and awful tides, and now

 
“Sweeps above their coffined bones
In the wrecked chancel by the shivered shrine”?
 

The deep sea guards them and engirds them, and no man shall say where the lovers lie in their last sleep. King Mark buried the two in one grave, and planted over it a rose-bush and vine, the branches of which so intermingled that they became inseparable. Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson have best told the whole story in our language in modern times. But it is no slight task to trace the literary history and development of the beautiful theme. A German minnesänger of the twelfth century, Gotfrit of Strasburg, is the first to whom the romance is ascribed, though Scott and others have claimed for Thomas of Ercildoune (Thomas the Rhymer) the best poetic version, only one copy of which is extant. A thirteenth-century manuscript, which contains a French metrical version of the romance, has been noted by Lockhart as citing the authority of Thomas the Rhymer for the story of Tristram and Iseult; but Thomas’s version was totally different from the prose romances. Great efforts have been made at one time and another to prove the story to be of English, French, and German origin, but at least this much is assured—the principal scenes are English, and the leading events in the history of Tristram, the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, occur at Tintagel. He journeyed to Ireland to bring back the daughter of the queen of that country, and he journeyed to Brittany to bring back his own wife, that Iseult of the White Hand who failed to win his love. His adventures as a Knight of the Round Table took him, as was usual, over much territory and to foreign lands; but it is to Cornwall that the interest always returns, and in which it is concentrated. Among the “wind-hollowed heights and gusty bays” of Tintagel, and within the “towers washed round with rolling foam,” the knight and the damsel wedded to King Mark, who had saved him from torture and death, lived their lives of forbidden love. The Minstrel-knight suited his voice to the mellow chords of his harp, and wandered about the woods and beside the sea in the May-time of his happiness with Iseult the Queen. And when the knight had wedded another Iseult, it was at Tintagel that Mark’s wife, with her passionate thoughts, her sorrow, and her despair, sat alone in a casement and heard the night speak and thunder on the sea “ravening aloud for ruin of lives.” Such words can be easily comprehended by those who have seen Tintagel in storm, the wind roaring, the seas flashing white, a blinding mist of rain between the heavy sky and the weltering waves. The rage of the elements, the vehemence of the warring tide, the dash and the recoil at the castle-base, have only their parallel in the human passion which was too strong for life itself to withstand, when deserted Iseult saw before her the corpse of her lover. Tristram, ill-fated from birth, was doomed to die by treachery. He was wounded, and learnt that he could only be healed by the magic art of the woman he loved, of her who had cured him before. He sent for Iseult to cross the sea in order to save him, and commanded the messenger to hoist a white sail if she consented and was on her way. The white sail was hoisted, but the other Iseult, the faithful but neglected wife, could not resist saying what jealousy prompted—that the sail was black. Sir Tristram immediately expired. Malory’s romance declares that the knight met his death at the hands of King Mark, who slew him “as he sat harping afore his lady La Beale Isoud, with a trenchant glaive, for whose death was much bewailing of every knight that ever were in King Arthur’s days.”