simile, no doubt, may be overdone. It has often been satirised in many mock heroic works. But it survives; it is one of the great beauties of Hyperion; there is as much of it in Sohrab and Rustum as in the Idylls of the King, and in neither is it untrue to its origin:—
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.'
An answer to the critics on this point has been given by Dr Warren in his comparison of Tennyson and Dante, and I am content to follow the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and find in the similes of Tennyson the same proportions as in Dante, the same transgression, if such it be, from the main theme to the incidental, the same exorbitant delight
