never heere more of mee, pray for my soule.’ But evermore the queenes and the ladies wept and shriked that it was pity for to heare them. And as soone as Sir Bedivere had lost the sight of the barge, he wept and wailed, and so tooke the forrest[1].”
This fair Avalon—
“Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,”
is the Isle of the Blessed of the Kelts. Tzetze and Procopius attempt to localize it, and suppose that the Land of Souls is Britain; but in this they are mistaken; as also are those who think to find Avalon at Glastonbury. Avalon is the Isle of Apples—a name reminding one of the Garden of the Hesperides in the far western seas, with its tree of golden apples in the midst. When we are told that in the remote Ogygia sleeps Kronos gently, watched by Briareus, till the time comes for his awaking, we have a Græcized form of the myth of Arthur in Avalon being cured of his grievous wound. It need hardly be said that the Arthur of romance is actually a demi-god, believed in
- ↑ La Mort d’Arthure, by Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Wright, vol. iii. c. 168.
