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 of the last stanza, which is more irregular than the others, we can indicate as follows: O love´|they die´|in yon´|rich sky´ They faint´|on hill´|or field´|or riv´|er: Our ech´|oes roll´|from soul´|to soul´, And grow´|for ev´|er and´|for ev´|er Blow, bu´|gle, blow´|--set´|the wild ech´|oes fly´|ing, And an´|swer, ech´|oes, an´|swer, dy´|ing, dy´|ing, dy´|ing. In the next to the last line there are five feet and one added syllable, if we consider that the pause which we naturally make before the word _set_ is equivalent to a syllable. In the last line there are six feet with an added syllable. This additional foot which appears in the last line of every stanza is introduced to imitate the lingering death of the echoes.