" All
Tennyson's own is the beautiful passage -
"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.'"
Yniol frankly admits in the tale that he was in the wrong in the
quarrel with his nephew. The poet, however, gives him the right, as
is natural. The combat is exactly followed in the Idyll, as is
Geraint's insistence in carrying his bride to Court in her faded
silks. Geraint, however, leaves Court with Enid, not because of the
scandal about Lancelot, but to do his duty in his own country. He
becomes indolent and uxorious, and Enid deplores his weakness, and
awakes his suspicions, thus:-
And one morning in the summer time they were upon their couch, and
Geraint lay upon the edge of it.
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