Half inwardly, half audibly she spoke, And the strong passion in her made her weep True tears upon his broad and naked breast, And these awoke him, and by great mischance He heard but fragments of her later words, And that she fear’d she was not a true wife. And then he thought, ‘In spite of all my care, For all my pains, poor man, for all my pains, She is not faithful to me, and I see her Weeping for some gay knight in Arthur’s hall.’ Then tho’ he loved and reverenced her too much To dream she could be guilty of foul act, Right thro’ his manful breast darted the pang That makes a man, in the sweet face of her Whom he loves most, lonely and miserable. At this he hurl’d his huge limbs out of bed, And shook his drowsy squire awake and cried, ‘My charger and her palfrey’; then to her, ‘I will ride forth into the wilderness; For tho’ it seems my spurs are yet to win, I have not fall’n so low as some would wish. And thou, put on thy worst and meanest dress And ride with me.’ And Enid ask’d, amazed, ‘If Enid errs, let Enid learn her fault.’ But he, ‘I charge thee, ask not, but obey.’ Then she bethought her of a faded silk, A faded mantle and a faded veil, And moving toward a cedarn cabinet, Wherein she kept them folded reverently With sprigs of summer laid between the folds, She took them, and array’d herself therein, Remembering when first he came on her Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it, And all her foolish fears about the dress, And all his journey to her, as himself Had told her, and their coming to the court.” Tennyson’s “Arms on which the standing muscle sloped, As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it,” is suggested perhaps by Theocritus—“The muscles on his brawny arms stood out like rounded rocks that the winter torrent has rolled and worn smooth, in the great swirling stream” (Idyll xxii.) The second part of the poem follows the original less closely. Thus Limours, in the tale, is not an old suitor of Enid; Edyrn does not appear to the rescue; certain cruel games, veiled in a magic mist, occur in the tale, and are omitted by the poet; “Gwyffert petit, so called by the Franks, whom the Cymry call the Little King,” in the tale, is not a character in the Idyll, and, generally, the gross Celtic exaggerations of Geraint’s feats are toned down by Tennyson. In other respects, as when Geraint eats the mowers’ dinner, the tale supplies the materials. But it does not dwell tenderly on the reconciliation. The tale is more or less in the vein of “patient Grizel,” and he who told it is more concerned with the fighting than with _amoris redintegratio_, and the sufferings of Enid. The Idyll is enriched with many beautiful pictures from nature, such as this:—