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THE SILVER CHALICE.

A WINDY waste, a realm of blowing sands;

Fields briar-tangled; woods without a leaf,

Where great boughs crash'd when autumn's unseen hands

Touch'd them; low hillocks rounding to the sky;

A sea forever tempest; a low shore

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Forever drown'd in surf and margin'd with

Black sedge; where shone not sun or moon at full, -

The old, half-mythic land of Lyonnesse:

Whose king, Meliodas, had wed with Beth,

Mark's sister, of Cornwall; she at love's first bloom

Had fallen in death, bearing him one fair son,

Call'd Tristram, for full sorrowful was his birth.

He being unmother'd thus, came wedding-feast

For the King and Isador of Brittany;

And she was second mother to the boy,

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