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!"