his mistress chose to enclose him in a tree, but nobody knows where, though it is sometimes surmised to have been on a little island, off the Bec du Raz, called Sein, which is fabled to have been also the scene of his birth. Tennyson describes Merlin's prison as
'an oak, so hollow huge and old
It look'd a tower of ruin'd masonwork.'
This deviates greatly from the original myth, but it retains one important feature: it makes Merlin immortal. He may pine away like Tithonus, but he is a god,[1] who cannot die; his living spirit abides with his dead body, an idea which Ariosto expresses with ghastly vividness in the words—
'Col corpo niorto il vivo spirto alberga.'[2]
Similarly, the fact of the Lady of the Lake being represented coming every day to solace Merlin in his loneliness, is in thorough harmony with the mythological notion that made the dawn-goddess sometimes ally herself with the sun-god and sometimes with one of his dusky rivals. The same remark applies with even more force to the descriptions of Merlin's abode as a house of glass, as a bush of white thorns laden with bloom, as a sort of smoke of mist in the air, or as 'a clos . . . . nother of Iren, ne stiell, ne tymbir, ne of ston, but . . . . of the aire with-oute eny othir thinge be enchauntemente so stronge, that it may neuer be vn-don while the worlde endureth.'[3] These pictures vie with one another
