nd threw his rosy light
upon the heights above the glade. When in this poetic vein Tennyson has
described the scene, he throws in _The Bugle Song_ without any comment.

We will understand it better if we paraphrase it briefly. Let us imagine
ourselves standing on some peak and looking over a scene lighted by the
setting sun.

"The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story."

The light in long quivering beams is thrown across the lakes, and a wild
cataract, made glorious by the golden light, leaps down a neighboring
precipice. At this moment, somewhere in the distance we hear a bugle
which sets wild echoes flying in every direction about us. As these
echoes die away,

"O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going,"

there comes reflected to us from cliff and abrupt promontory the faint
sound of the little horns of Fairyland. To them the purple glens reply
in echoes gently dying into silence. O love, those echoes die away in
the rich sky, and faint into nothingness on hill and field and river;
but echoes of our thoughts, our feelings, of ourselves, roll on from one
soul to another and grow in power forever and forever.

The music in the lyric is dependent upon the choice of words and the
arrangement of words. The words are chosen because of their meaning and
because of the sounds which compose them. They are so arranged that the
sequence is melodious and that the accents fall where needed to perfect
the meter. The first three lines are perfectly smooth and regular, but
the fourth is an abrupt change; "And the wild cataract leaps in glory"
suggests power and strong interrupted motion. The last two lines of the
stanza are somewhat irregular in meter, and the double repetition of the
last word suggests the time elapsing while the echoes are flying back
and forth between the surrounding cliffs, growing fainter and fainter
with each repetition. In reading we show this: "Blow, bugle," is the
original sound; we pause for the echoes to answer, "dying, dying,
dying."

In the second stanza the poet has selected words in which the vowels
have thin and delicate sounds:

"how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!"

So soft are the echoes that they suggest to the poet the delicate
refrain from the musical instruments of fairies, and he describes it in
the poetic phrase,

"The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!"

The meter