in the poem which follows, Merlin and Vivien.

The nature and origin of Merlin are something of a mystery. Hints
and rumours of Merlin, as of Arthur, stream from hill and grave as
far north as Tweedside. If he was a historical person, myths of
magic might crystallise round him, as round Virgil in Italy. The
process would be the easier in a country where the practices of
Druidry still lingered, and revived after the retreat of the Romans.
The mediaeval romancers invented a legend that Merlin was a virgin-
born child of Satan. In Tennyson he may be guessed to represent the
fabled esoteric lore of old religions, with their vague pantheisms,
and such magic as the tapas of Brahmanic legends. He is wise with a
riddling evasive wisdom: the builder of Camelot, the prophet, a
shadow of Druidry clinging to the Christian king. His wisdom cannot
avail him: if he beholds "his own mischance with a glassy
countenance," he cannot avoid his shapen fate. He becomes assotted
of Vivien, and goes open-eyed to his doom.

The enchantress, Vivien, is one of that dubious company of Ladies of
the Lake, now friendly, now treacherous. Probably these ladies are
the fairies of popular Celtic tradition, taken up into the more
elaborate poetry of Cymric literature and mediaeval romance. Mr Rhys
traces Vivien, or Nimue, or Nyneue, back, through a series of
palaeographic changes and errors, to Rhiannon, wife of Pwyll, a kind
of lady of the lake he thinks, but the identification is not very
satisfactory. Vivien is certainly "one of the damsels of the lake"
in Malory, and the damsels of the lake seem to be lake fairies, with
all their beguilements and strange unstable loves. "And always
Merlin lay about the lady to have her maidenhood, and she was ever
passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, for