The simplicity and grace of the principal character in Enid, with which the volume opens, touches, but does not too strongly agitate, the deeper springs of feeling.  She is the beautiful daughter of Earl Yniol, who, by his refusal of a turbulent neighbour as a suitor, has drawn upon himself the ruin of his fortunes, and is visited in his depressed condition by (p. 1)—­

  The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur’s court,
  A tributary prince of Devon, one
  Of that great order of the Table Round....

Geraint wins her against the detested cousin.  They wed, and she becomes the purest gem of the court of Guinevere, her place in which is described in the beautiful exordium of the poem.  An accident, slight perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours; but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is described in lines of a beauty that leaves nothing to be desired.

The treatment of Enid by her husband has appeared to some of Mr. Tennyson’s readers to be unnatural.  It is no doubt both in itself repulsive, and foreign to our age and country.  But the brutal element in man, which now only invades the conjugal relation in cases where it is highly concentrated, was then far more widely diffused, and not yet dissociated from alternations and even habits of attachment.  Something of what we now call Eastern manners at one time marked the treatment even of the women of the West.  Unnatural means contrary to nature, irrespectively of time or place; but time and place explain and warrant the treatment of Enid by Geraint.

Vivien, which follows Enid, is perhaps the least popular of the four Books.  No pleasure, we grant, can be felt from the character either of the wily woman, between elf and fiend, or of the aged magician, whose love is allowed to travel whither none of his esteem or regard can follow it:  and in reading this poem we miss the pleasure of those profound moral harmonies, with which the rest are charged.  But we must not on these grounds proceed to the conclusion that the poet has in this case been untrue to his aims.  For he has neither failed in power, nor has he led our sympathies astray; and if we ask why he should introduce us to those we cannot love, there is something in the reply that Poetry, the mirror of the world, cannot deal with its attractions only, but must present some of its repulsions also, and avail herself of the powerful assistance of its contrasts.  The example of Homer, who allows Thersites to thrust himself upon the scene in the debates of heroes, gives a sanction to what reason and all experience teach, namely, the actual force of negatives in heightening effect; and the gentle and noble characters and beautiful combinations, which largely predominate in the other poems, stand in far clearer and bolder relief when we perceive the dark and baleful shadow of Vivien lowering from between them.