"Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks: 'What hast thou seen,
what heard?' Bedivere answers:

"'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag,'

"--lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns that I never stand
in solitude beside their waters but I hear the verses in my heart. At
the last he throws it.

"The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.

"'So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur,' and never yet in poetry did
any sword, flung in the air, flash so superbly.

"The rest of the natural description is equally alive, and the passage
where the sound echoes the sense, and Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs
as he moves among the icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting,
clashing sound as any to be found in Tennyson:

"Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rung
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.