Vivien exhibits a well-sustained conflict between the wizard and, in another sense, the witch; on one side is the wit of woman, on the other are the endowments of the prophet and magician, at once more and less than those of nature.  She has heard from him of a charm, a charm of “woven paces, and of waving hands,” which paralyses its victim for ever and without deliverance, and her object is to extract from him the knowledge of it as a proof of some return for the fervid and boundless love that she pretends.  We cannot but estimate very highly the skill with which Mr. Tennyson has secured to what seemed the weaker vessel the ultimate mastery in the fight.  Out of the eater comes forth meat.  When she seems to lose ground with him by her slander against the Round Table which he loved, she recovers it by making him believe that she saw all other men, “the knights, the Court, the King, dark in his light”:  and when in answer to her imprecation on herself a fearful thunderbolt descends and storm rages, then, nestling in his bosom, part in fear but more in craft, she overcomes the last remnant of his resolution, wins the secret she has so indefatigably wooed, and that instant uses it to close in gloom the famous career of the over-mastered sage.

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Nowhere could we more opportunely than at this point call attention to Mr. Tennyson’s extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor and simile.  This gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in abundance, truth, and grace.  As the showers descend from heaven to return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson’s loving observation of Nature, and his Muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on both sides.  When he was young, and when “Oenone” was first published, he almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into Troas, which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there.  It is a small but yet an interesting and significant indication that, when some years after he retouched the poem, he omitted the note, and generalised the grasshopper.  Whether we are right or not in taking this for a sign of the movement of his mind, there can be no doubt that his present use of figures is both the sign and the result of a reverence for Nature alike active, intelligent, and refined.  Sometimes applying the metaphors of Art to Nature, he more frequently draws the materials of his analogies from her unexhausted book, and, however often he may call for some new and beautiful vehicle of illustration, she seems never to withhold an answer.  With regard to this particular and very critical gift, it seems to us that he may challenge comparison with almost any poet either of ancient or modern times.  We have always been accustomed to look upon Ariosto as one of the greatest among the masters of the art of metaphor and simile; and it would be easy to quote from him instances which in tenderness, grace, force, or all combined, can never be surpassed.  But we have rarely seen the power subjected to a greater trial than in the passages just quoted from Mr. Tennyson, where metaphor lies by metaphor as thick as shells upon their bed; yet each individually with its outline as well drawn, its separateness as clear, its form as true to nature, and with the most full and harmonious contribution to the general effect.