descending the path, strike forth the landscape. From 1842 onwards, indeed earlier when that brilliant apparition of Paris in Enone issues from the wood, Tennyson rarely painted a landscape without humanity, and he places his figures with all the skill of a painter. He knew that Nature alone was not half as delightful as Nature and man together. Lover of Nature as he was, he avoided the crowning fault of modern poetry-the unmitigated merciless description of Nature, trickling on for fifty and a hundred lines together, without one touch of human interest. He knew the great mastersHomer, Virgil, and the rest of these who see and feel at the same moment-too well to fall into that dreary error. He was too much of a great master himself to commit it. It is from this impassioned mingling of the soul and sight of man with the soul and sight of Nature that the specialised loveliness arises which charms us, and dignifies itself, in the descriptions of Tennyson. There is no finer example of this than in Geraint's first sight of Enid. We see the castle courtyard, the ruined towers, with all their grass and flowers and ivy, as with the naked eye. But in the midst we see Geraint and Yniol,

especially of livingness, from too great a devotion to conciseness. The river is gone, and the horses bending to drink; and the river is the living spirit of the landscape. I am sorry also to lose my curiosity about the satchel. Above all, why have left out the eye of the picture, and in colour too? How could he leave out the blue pitcher? Tennyson had no intense love of colour. Black and white were his favourite vehicles. in colour.

He was no Venetian. Few of his shadows are

and then we hear Enid singing and the castle court is filled with her. Nothing can be closer to nature than these lines, which describe the ivy climbing the castle; every word is alive with fact:

And monstrous ivy-stems

Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibred arms,
And suck'd the joining of the stones, and look'd
A knot, beneath, of snakes-aloft, a grove..

Wordsworth would have given a life of its own to that, but Tennyson draws it only as it is, leaves it, once he has brushed it in, and passes on to fill the ancient court with youth by Enid's voice, and to make her voice. awaken fatherly love in Yniol's heart and passion in Geraint's. They stand still, enthralled, looking up, and listening. And Enid sings that song of fortitude in poverty, of the mastery of the soul in good or evil fortune, which is so finely written that it speaks the very soul of enduring manhood and womanhood all over the world.* There is as much strength as there is beauty in the whole scene; and the two comparisons of the effect on Geraint of Enid's voice are one of the noblest instances we can give of that sweet keen delicacy in Tennyson which, in contrast with his bluff power, is so pleasant a surprise. Let me quote the passage:

*The motive comes from Dante; but with what grace and beauty it is varied and enhanced! The soul of the girl is in it, and the soul of the situation. And it fits, enlightens, strengthens, and consoles those everywhere who are in a similiar condition.

And while he waited in the castle court,
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang
Clear thro' the open casement of the hall,
Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,

Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear, and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form;
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint ;
And made him like a man abroad at morn
When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave
To Britain, and in April suddenly

Breaks from a coppice gemm'd with green and red,*
And he suspends his converse with a friend,

Or it may be the labour of his hands,

To think or say, "There is the nightingale ";

So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,

'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me."

To this first impression of her Enid is true throughout. Her patience is too overwrought to permit us to class her among the higher types of womanhood-indeed, these very patient women are always painted by men-and her own character is sometimes overwhelmed by the allegorical representation of patience Tennyson makes through her. But when we ignore this, and get down, below the type, to her natural womanhood, Enid is full of truth and life. When she hears that she is loved by Geraint and lies awake all night; when she longs to be beautifully dressed to pleasure her lord and do him credit; when she slips from her couch into her

*Chaucer also saw these spring colours of the young trees

"Some very red, and some a glad light green."

golden dress, like the star of morn from a bank of snow into a sunlit cloud; when time after time she warns Geraint of his foes; when she is left alone in the bandit hall and thinks Geraint is dead, and sends the power of her suffering and her nature into the rude crowd, she is always of the same strength and gentleness, always sweet with a sacred charm, so that we do not wonder that Tennyson was so moved with his own creation as to write about her some of the loveliest lines he ever wrote of womanhood, when once more at home in her husband's heart she rides away with him from the savage lands:

And never yet, since high in Paradise

O'er the four rivers the first roses blew,
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind

Than lived thro' her, who in that perilous hour
Put hand to hand beneath her husband's heart,
And felt him hers again: she did not weep,

But o'er her meek eyes came a happy mist

Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
Before the useful trouble of the rain.

And with these lines, beautiful with a paradise of tenderness, I leave these Idylls of Geraint and Enid.

Balin and Balan, the Idyll next in order in the completed book, was the last published by Tennyson. It shows no weariness of hand or brain, no lack of his clear conciseness, no want of imaginative presentation either of the moods of men or Nature. The blank verse is as skilful and robust as ever, only a little more abrupt, less

flowing than in the earlier Idylls. The subject, however, continually demands this abruptness, for Balin is the incarnation of natural violence of temper. The intellectual treatment of the story is as fine as the imaginative. If we compare the tale as it is in Malory with Tennyson's re-making of it here for the purpose of his allegory, we shall understand how acutely, skilfully, and profoundly the combining intellect has built up the skeleton of the tale before the imaginative passion put flesh upon it and sent the blood racing through it. As he painted in Geraint suspicion growing into rudeness and meanness, and in Edyrn pride, or rather arrogance-and these evil things as enemies of the soul of man-so he paints in Balin the general idea of furious anger as another enemy of the soul. Balin, for Tennyson clings at times to the theory of heredity, drew this temper from his father. He was begotten in an hour of wrath. He was banished from the Table Round for an outbreak of violence. He is restored to it by Arthur and begins to learn gentleness from Lancelot and the King. But his moods, born in his blood, leap on him like fiends, and he despairs. The gentle temper of the Court is too high for him, and he takes to the wild woods again, his rage now turned upon himself the chained rage which yelpt within him like a hound." Struggle after struggle he makes against himself; and well, and with an imaginative ethic, these are varied and drawn by Tennyson. The last struggle is that which he makes by keeping before his eyes the Queen's crown upon his shield. But the good