THE Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape: they are not an epic, but a series of heroic _idyllia_ of the same genre as the heroic _idyllia_ of Theocritus. He wrote long after the natural age of national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later literary epic rise in the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic _idyllia_ of Heracles, and certain adventures of the Argonauts. Tennyson, too, from the first believed that his pieces ought to be short. Therefore, though he had a conception of his work as a whole, a conception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, he produced no epic, only a series of epic _idyllia_. He had a spiritual conception, “an allegory in the distance,” an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt. No longer, as in youth, did Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise “the sceptical understanding” (as if one were to “break into blank the gospel of” Herr Kant), or poor Guinevere to stand for the Blessed Reformation, or the Table Round for Liberal Institutions. Mercifully Tennyson never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion. Later he thought of a musical masque of Arthur, and sketched a _scenario_. Finally Tennyson dropped both the allegory of Liberal principles and the musical masque in favour of the series of heroic idylls. There was only a “parabolic drift” in the intention. “There is no single fact or incident in the Idylls, however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever.” The Idylls ought to be read (and the right readers never dream of doing anything else) as romantic poems, just like Browning’s _Childe Roland_, in which the wrong readers (the members of the Browning Society) sought for mystic mountains and marvels. Yet Tennyson had his own interpretation, “a dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin.” That was his “interpretation,” or “allegory in the distance.”