Descended, and the Sun was washed away;
but occasionally the effort to give variety leads into mere puzzles and disagreeable fractures of metre, such as the following quatrain:
Courteous or bestial from the moment,
Such as have nor law nor king; and three of these
Proud in their fantasy, call themselves the Day,
Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star.
The first line in this quotation, if it be not a misprint of the American edition, can only be brought to any kind of rule by accenting each polysyllable 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,