The county of Somerset, a land of broad, green valleys enclosed by rugged ranges of hill and upland, has been compared in form to an arm slightly bent about the eastern and southern shores of Bristol Channel. The river Parrett crosses it at the elbow, dividing it into a southern section,--moors, bogs, mountains, with the deep vale of the river Tone--and a northern part, larger and more populous, but hardly less broken. Above the Parrett, and almost parallel with it, runs the river Brue, draining that once vast peat swamp known as the Brent Marshes. Glastonbury now stands on the north bank of the Brue, but at some remote period was islanded in the midst of the river. The Britons--if the wise say true--called it The Appletree Isle, or Avalon,--a name caught up in the golden meshes of Arthurian romance. The wounded king but
"passes to the Isle Avilion, He passes and is heal'd and cannot die."
The Britons in their heathen days had dreamed of a fairyland where death and sorrow entered not, the Celtic Tir-na-n'Og, an Island of Immortal Youth hid somewhere in the flushed, mysterious west, and the Christian faith, that came so early to Glastonbury, did not destroy but gathered to itself the wistful hope, so that the site of one of the earliest churches in England became the centre of strangely blended legends. It was in the Isle of Avalon, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the sword Excalibur was forged, and after Arthur had passed from mortal ken, he was not dead, but still, through the waiting centuries,
"Mythic Uther's deeply wounded son In some fair space of sloping greens Lay, dozing, in the vale of Avalon, And watched by weeping queens."
Yet the mediæval voices, that we would gladly believe more simply than we may, tell us that Arthur was buried at Glastonbury in a sarcophagus hollowed out of the trunk of an oak, that the penitent Guinevere was laid at his feet, that the skeletons were uncovered and removed to the church in the reign of Henry II, and were seen by so sane a witness as Leland so late as the middle of the sixteenth century. But in King Arthur, death is life, and not his reputed grave, nor the giant bones folk wondered at, nor the golden lock of Guinevere that crumbled at a monk's too eager clutch, could shake the faith in his second coming. Malory, writing in the fifteenth century, illustrates even in his half denial the persistency of that expectation: