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Copyright, 1900, by

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

IDYLLS

W. P. I

INTRODUCTION.

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING consists of twelve poems dealing with the life of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. The collection is prefaced by a dedication to Prince Albert, who had warmly admired the four Idylls published before his death, and is appropriately closed by an address to the Queen.

The poems as a whole constitute a true English epic, or, perhaps more exactly, a true British epic, and the only one which English-speaking people can properly call their own; for not only are they written in the English language, but they deal with British personages and their scenes are laid on British soil. The tales cluster about Arthur as their central figure, and are given a spiritual unity by the intimate association of the Holy Grail with the narrative. Like most of the other great epics of the world, the tales end in darkness and desolation, but we are not left without the thought of the dawn to follow the dark, the new sun which is to bring in the new year.

Tennyson, in his "Dedication to the Queen," speaks of the poems as an allegory, for he says of them that they are

66 New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak."

But we must not press this allegorical interpretation too closely. In many of the best of the Idylls the allegory is

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