Came swelling up the rocky way.
Lady of the Lake.
“Tayho! Tayho!”[[1]]
And straightway to the cry responded the long-drawn, mellow notes of the huge French-horns which were in those days used by every yeoman pricker, as the peculiar and time-honored instrument of the stag-hunt, the mots of which were as familiar to every hunter’s ear, as so many spoken words of his vernacular.
It was the gray dawn of a lovely summer morning in the latter part of July, and although the moor-cocks were crowing sharp and shrill from every rocky knoll or purple eminence of the wild moors, now waving far and wide with the redolent luxuriance of their amethyst garniture, for the heather was in its full flush of bloom, although the thrush and black-bird were caroling in emulous joy, at the very top of their voices, from every brake and thicket which feathered the wild banks of the hill-burns, the sun had not lifted a portion of his disc above the huge, round-topped fells which formed the horizon to the north and westward of my scene. That scene was the slope of a long hill—
“A gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity—the last,
As ’twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base
But a most living landscape and the wave