theless, in the midst of this main current of the story there are islands of noble poetry; and there are episodes, apart from the story, which belong to the pure imagination. One part, even of Vivien's representation, is admirable. It is her outburst of false tenderness, during which she sings the song of Trust me not at all, or all in all," which begins:

In love, if love be love, if love be ours,

Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers;
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

It is the little rift within the lute

That by and by will make the music mute,
And, ever widening, slowly silence all.

This song is excellent in its representation of half-true, half-false sentiment, and for the subtle way in which the false sentiment in it is made to overtop the true. It is all the more excellent when we contrast it with that true rendering of Vivien by herself in the song which extols the fire of the Pagan heaven. Merlin detects its masked untruthfulness, and sets over against it the song he once heard sung by a young knight in the early days of Arthur's reign, when they projected the founding of the Round Table for love of God and men. This is a lovely, clarion-versed passage-one of the brilliantly invented episodes which occur in this Idyll:

Far other was the song that once I heard
By this huge oak, sung nearly where we sit :
For here we met, some ten or twelve of us,
To chase a creature that was current then

In these wild woods, the hart with golden horns.
It was the time when first the question rose
About the founding of a Table Round,
That was to be, for love of God and men
And noble deeds, the flower of all the world.
And each incited each to noble deeds,
And while we waited, one, the youngest of us,
We could not keep him silent, out he flash'd,
And into such a song, such fire for fame,
Such trumpet-blowings in it, coming down
To such a stern and iron-clashing close,

That when he stopt we long'd to hurl together,
And should have done it; but the beauteous beast,
Scared by the noise upstarted at our feet,

And like a silver shadow slipt away

Thro' the dim land; and all day long we rode
Thro' the dim land against a rushing wind,
That glorious roundel echoing in our ears,
And chased the flashes of his golden horns
Until they vanish'd by the fairy well
That laughs at iron.

A speech of Merlin's follows, on true love and fame, and their relation each to each, worthy of the study of all men and women, and done in Tennyson's weightiest and fullest manner. The more excellent it is in itself, the more it reveals the unnaturalness of the main conception. That Merlin should so speak, and an hour afterwards yield as he yielded, shocks both intelligence and feeling. But the speech is not only good; it is also personally interesting. It tells us Tennyson's thoughts about his fame, and his desire to have his fame in the use that his poetry may be to the world. Merlin's memory of what he felt when he looked as a young man on the second star in the dagger of Orion, is so particular a recollection

that I cannot but imagine that Tennyson is relating a

story of himself :

A single misty star,

Which is the second in a line of stars

That seem a sword beneath a belt of three

I never gazed upon it but I dreamt

Of some vast charm concluded in that star
To make fame nothing.

If this conjecture be true, we see the poet in his youth, dreaming of fame and yet controlling his dreams. It is Tennyson all over, and this sober self-control, standing guard over fervent imagination, is one of the secrets of his power. But the most brilliant of the episodes, happy in invention, vivid in imaginative treatment, is the story Merlin tells of his magic book and of the origin of the spell by which he is finally overcome.

Moreover, in dispraising the drawing of Merlin under Vivien's temptation we should not forget to praise the drawing of his state of mind at the beginning; the melancholy for himself and the world that fell upon him in dark and dim presentiment, and the illustrations from Nature by which it is imaged. Merlin before his vanishing, and in the prophetic air of death, sees all the woe that is to be, all the fates of Arthur's kingdom:

Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy:

He walk'd with dreams and darkness, and he found

A doom that ever poised itself to fall,

An ever-moaning battle in the mist,
World-war of dying flesh against the life,
Death in all life and lying in all love,
The meanest having power upon the highest,
And the high purpose broken by the worm.

This is greatly conceived and felt, and equal to it in poetic power-one of Tennyson's most subtle and splendid illustrations-is this

So dark a forethought roll'd about his brain

As on a dull day in an ocean cave

The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence.

The full power of human imagination is added in those lines to the business of the sea, and lifts the thing into a great nobility; while in his next illustration of the same presentiment he describes exactly what many have seen but few observed:

O did ye never lie upon the shore,

And watch the curl'd white of the coming wave
Glass'd in the slippery sand before it breaks?
Ev'n such a wave, but not so pleasurable,
Dark in the glass of some presageful mood,
Had I for three days seen, ready to fall.

It remains to say one word of the scenery of the piece and of its close. We are in the wild forest of Broceliande in Brittany. Great meadows, full of buttercups, fill the space between the sea and the huge wood. The wood is of ancient oaks; in it there are glades, and sweet springs dropping from the rocky clefts, and fairy wells; and Merlin and Vivien sit near a hollow oak, the same, perhaps, that Heine saw. There the storm overtakes them, and they refuge in the hollow tree. As the lightning leaps and the thunder peals, Vivien flies into Merlin's arms and has her way :

And ever overhead

Bellow'd the tempest, and the rotten branch

Snapt in the rushing of the river-rain

Above them.

It is a habit of Tennyson's, as I have said before, to make Nature reflect the passions of man, and the end of Vivien is no exception to this common rule.

The Idyll of Lancelot and Elaine follows that of Merlin and Vivien. Woven in and out of it is the story of the development to which the love of Lancelot and Guinevere had now attained, and this is one of the best and most human pieces of work in the Idylls. I will, however, keep it for a more fitting place. The character of Elaine herself and her story can be put with brevity, and it is not difficult to see why Elaine follows Vivien.

Elaine is set over against Vivien in the fullest contrast. As the root of Vivien is conscious guilt, so the root of Elaine is unconscious innocence. As Vivien has the boldness of Hate derived from lust, so Elaine has the boldness of Love derived from purity. Vivien lives in the dry, clear world of cynicism. Not one wavering mist of fancy clouds her cruel eyes-not one imagination of love touches her. Elaine lives in a world of dim fantasy and all the fantasy is born of love. She was happy, not knowing she was happy, till she saw Sir Lancelot. Then she loved, and loved for her death. She is the Lady of Shalott (Shalott is Astolat) over again, but with a tender difference: