lable on the last, and is not, when even that is done, a
pleasant piece of caprice. There are plenty of phrases that shock
the attention sufficiently to keep it from stagnating on the smooth
surface of the verse; such are--"ever-highering eagle-circles," "there
were none but few goodlier than he," "tipt with trenchant steel," and
the expression, already famous, of "tip-tilted" for Lynette's nose; to
which may be added the object of Gareth's attention, mentioned in the
third line of the poem, when he "stared at the _spate_." But in the
matter of descriptive power we do not know that the Laureate
has succeeded better for a long time past in his touches of
landscape-painting: the pictures of halls, castles, rivers and
woods are all felicitous. For example, this in five lines, where the
travelers saw

Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines,
A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink
To westward; in the deeps whereof a mere,
Round as the red eye of an eagle-owl,
Under the half-dead sunset glared; and cries
Ascended.

Or this simple and beautiful sketch of crescent moonlight:

Silent the silent field
They traversed. Arthur's harp tho' summer-wan,
In counter motion to the clouds, allured
The glance of Gareth dreaming on his liege.
A star shot.

It is still, perfect, and utterly simple sketches like these, thrown
off in the repose of power, that form the best setting for a heroic
or poetical action: what better device was ever invented, even by
Tennyson himself, for striking just the right note in the reader's
mind while thinking of a noble primitive knight, than that in another
Idyl, where Lancelot went along, looking at a star, "_and wondered
what it was"?_ Of a more imaginative kind of beauty are the
descriptions of the walls of rock near Castle Dangerous, decked by the
hermit with tinted bas-reliefs, and the fine one of Camelot, looking
as if "built by fairy kings," with its city gate surmounted by the
figures of the three mystic queens, "the friends of Arthur," and
decked upon the keystone with the image of the Lady, whose form is
set in ripples of stone and crossed by mystic fish, while her drapery
weeps from her sides as water flowing away. The most charming part of
the character-painting is where the shrewish Lynette, as her estimate
of the scullion-knight gradually rises in view of his mighty deeds,
evinces her kindlier mood, not directly in speech, but by catches of
lov