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madly;—St. Luce pass’t with never a groan;—

Sadly my master look’d round—he was riding—

on the boy’s right, with a line of his own.

“Thrusting his hand in his breast or breast-pocket,

while from his wrist the sword swung by a chain,

swiftly he drew out some trinket or locket,

kiss’t it (I think) and replaced it again.

“Burst, while his fingers reclined on the haft,

jarring concussion and earth-shaking din,

Horse counter’d horse, and I reel’d, but he laugh’t,

down went his man, cloven clean to the chin!”

Lord Tennyson has watched his charge through Mr. Russell’s field-glass, and we follow his view of it, but Gordon has ridden it and takes us with him. Old and miserable, the friend of the man who had ridden this “Last Charger,” offers up the same prayer as the man who had “visioned it in the smoke:”

“Would to God I had died with your master, old man,”

for—

“he was never more happy in life than in death.”

What I find so admirable in Gordon, and in almost all his characters is, that they are men, I mean men as opposed to dreamers or students. His Lancelot is Lancelot, the knight who has lived and loved largely. Tennyson’s is not. I must confess that I really think that “The Rhyme of Joyous Guard” is worth all the other “Idylls of the King,” save “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Passing of Arthur,” put together. I mean that I really think it has more real deep true significance. Take this conclusion, the last prayer of Lancelot, old and passed from the world: