challenge sparrow-hawk: the knight had won it twice, and if he won
it thrice it would be his to keep. The rest, in the tale, is exactly
followed in the Idyll. Geraint is entertained by the ruined Yniol.
The youth bears the "costrel" full of "good purchased mead" (the
ruined Earl not brewing for himself), and Enid carries the manchet
bread in her veil, "old, and beginning to be worn out." 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.'"