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.

But his moods, born

He is restored to it by Arthur and begins to learn gentleness from Lancelot and the King. 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

this is to him is destroyed when he hears from Vivien that the Queen is false to Arthur and with Lancelot. His two ideals are overthrown. He bursts into frenzy, tramples on his shield, and Balan, his brother, mistakes his unearthly yell for the cry of the Demon of the Wood. Ignorant of their brotherhood, these two charge. one another, and both fall wounded to the death. Vivien removes their helms, they recognise each other, and their farewell is one of the most pathetic things. which Tennyson has written.

"O brother," answered Balin, woe is me!
My madness all thy life has been thy doom,
Thy curse, and darken'd all thy day; and now
The night has come. I scarce can see thee now.
Good-night! for we shall never bid again
Good-morrow. Dark my doom was here, and dark
It will be there. I see thee now no more.

I would not mine again should darken thine.
Good-night, true brother."

Balan answered low,

"Good night, true brother here! Good-morrow there!

We two were born together, and we die

Together by one doom: " and while he spoke

Closed his death-drowsing eyes, and slept the sleep
With Balin, either lock'd in either's arm.*

This study of Tennyson's of Anger is quite original, and is made vivid by other characters clustered round it which exhibit different aspects of the same passion, of

Compare Mrs. Barbauld's

"Say not Good Night,-but in some brighter clime

Bid me Good Morning."

the means to overcome it, and of the powers opposed to it. It would be interesting to make a full comparison of it with the various Angers of Spenser-with the Wrath in the chariot of Pride, with the Furor of the second book of The Faerie Queene, with the Frenzy of Pyrochles and Cymochles. In Spenser these characters are wholly allegorical. In Balin and Balan the human element is greater than the allegorical. The inevitableness of Balin's fate makes the pity of it. The constant love of the two brothers is drawn with as much tenderness as beauty, and the ethical lesson which is indirectly given by their story does not arise from the allegory but from their human fates, their sorrow and their love.

Again, two new elements are introduced into the general representation, directly opposed one to the other -asceticism in King Pellam, and luxury (in the old sense of the word) in Vivien. Pellam, leaving human wrongs to right themselves, retires to his castle, lichenbearded and grayly draped with streaming grass

A house of bats, in every tower an owl

scarcely eats, repudiates his wife, and lets neither dame nor damsel enter his gates, lest he should be polluted. Tennyson's hatred of asceticism, of monkery, of the gloom and curse of it, is here accentuated. It has risen far beyond that which he felt when he wrote Simeon Stylites. He intensifies it when he represents King Pellam as taking it up from spiritual conceit and to spite King Arthur. Moreover, he attacks the chief evil which

follows asceticism when he makes Garlon, King Pellam's son, into the lover of Vivien the harlot, and places his lair in a cave, so black that it is like the mouth of hell. This horror of asceticism, of all religious views which separate men from doing the work of justice and love. in the open world, is fully developed, but in a different way, in The Holy Grail.

Vivien is the other element, now for the first time brought into the whole poem. She is here altogether allegorical, the incarnation of that impurity of sense which is, in Tennyson's mind, the bitterest enemy the soul can have, which more than all else breaks up and ruins not only States but also the powers by which States are made and held together-justice, knowledge, harmony, order, truth, true love, man's energy and woman's insight. All go down before her attack, and the next Idyll develops her fully.

Lastly, the descriptive power of Tennyson, which in the previous Idylls is concentrated into separate passages, is here diffused through the whole. When we have finished the Idyll, we see the whole wood-great trees, dense underwood, sweet springs, wolf-like caves, lonely castles, long avenues of trees, green glades, shadowy demons and hoar-headed woodmen in it. It is not separately described; it grows up, as the wood of Arden grows before us, from notes of woodland scattered among the action of the piece; and a delightful example it is of an artist's work.

There is, however, one little touch of direct descrip