Singing, in dreary monotone,

A Christmas carol of its own,

Whose burden still, as he might guess,

Was-"Shelterless, shelterless, shelterless!"

The voice of the seneschal flared like a torch
As he shouted the wanderer away from the porch,
And he sat in the gateway and saw all night

The great hall-fire, so cheery and bold,

Through the window-slits of the castle old,

Build out its piers of ruddy light

Against the drift of the cold.

PART SECOND.

I.

THERE was never a leaf on bush or tree,
That bare boughs rattled shudderingly;

The river was dumb and could not speak,

For the frost's swift shuttles its shroud had spun ;

A single crow on the tree-top bleak

From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun;

Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold,

As if her veins were sapless and old,

And she rose up decrepitly

For a last dim look at earth and sea.

II.

Sir Launfal turned from his own hard gate,

For another heir in his earldom sate;

An old, bent man, worn out and frail,

He came back from seeking the Holy Grail;
Little he recked of his earldom's loss,

No more on his surcoat was blazoned the cross,

But deep in his soul the sign he wore,

The badge of the suffering and the poor.

III.

Sir Launfal's raiment thin and spare

Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air,

For it was just at the Christmas time ;
So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime,

And sought for a shelter from cold and snow
In the light and warmth of long ago;

He sees the snake-like caravan crawl

O'er the edge of the desert, black and small, Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,

He can count the camels in the sun,

As over the red-hot sands they pass

To where, in its slender necklace of grass,

The little spring laughed and leapt in the shade,
And with its own self like an infant played,

And waved its signal of palms.

IV.

"For Christ's sweet sake, I beg an alms "
The happy camels may reach the spring,
But Sir Launfal sees naught save the grewsome thing,
The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone,

That cowered beside him, a thing as lone

And white as the ice-isles of Northern seas
In the desolate horror of his disease.

V.

And Sir Launfal said,—“I behold in thee
An image of Him who died on the tree;

Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns,

Thou also hast had the world's buffets and scorns,

And to thy life were not denied

The wounds in the hands and feet and side:

3*

Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me;

Behold, through him, I give to thee!"

VI.

Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes
And looked at Sir Launfal, and straightway he
Remembered in what a haughtier guise

He had flung an alms to leprosie,

When he caged his young life up in gilded mail • And set forth in search of the Holy Grail.

The heart within him was ashes and dust;

He parted in twain his single crust,

He broke the ice on the streamlet's brink,
And gave the leper to eat and drink;

'T was a mouldy crust of coarse brown bread,
'T was water out of a wooden bowl, —

Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed,

And 't was red wine he drank with his thirsty soul.

VII.

As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face,

A light shone round about the place;