133-142. Brimley in his valuable essay on Tennyson, analyses this poem in some detail. Of this passage he writes: "A series of brilliant effects is hit off in these two words, 'made lightnings.' 'Whirl'd in an arch,' is a splendid instance of sound answering to sense, which the older critics made so much of; the additional syllable which breaks the measure, and necessitates an increased rapidity of utterance, seeming to express to the ear the rush of the sword up its parabolic curve. And with what lavish richness of presentative power is the boreal aurora, the collision, the crash, and the thunder of the meeting icebergs, brought before the eye. An inferior artist would have shouted through a page, and emptied a whole pallet of colour, without any result but interrupting his narrative, where Tennyson in three lines strikingly illustrates the fact he has to tell,--associates it impressively with one of Nature's grandest phenomena, and gives a complete picture of this phenomenon besides." The whole essay deserves to be carefully read. 143. DIPT THE SURFACE. A poetical construction. 157. Note the personification of the sword. 182-183. CLOTHED--HILLS. His breath made a vapour in the frosty air through which his figure loomed of more than human size. Tennyson gives us the same effect in _Guinevere_, 597: The moving vapour rolling round the King, Who seem'd the phantom of a Giant in it, Enwound him fold by fold. But the classical example is found in Wordsworth's description of the mountain shepherd in _The Prelude_, Book VIII. When up the lonely brooks on rainy days Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, In size a giant, stalking through thick fog, His sheep like Greenland bears, or as he stepped Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow, His form hath flashed upon me, glorified By the deep radiance of the setting sun, 191-192. AND ON A SUDDEN--MOON. "Do we not," writes Brimley, "seem to burst from the narrow steep path down the ravine, whose tall precipitous sides hide the sky and the broad landscape from sight, and come out in a moment upon-- "the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon!" 193. HOVE=hove in sight.