_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 bas'd
His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels_--

or the exquisite

I heard the _water lapping on the crag_,
And the _long ripple washing in the reeds_.

So in 'The Dying Swan',

And _the wavy swell of the soughing reeds_.

See too the whole of 'Oriana' and the description of the dance at
the beginning of 'The Vision of Sin.'

Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and
provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the
Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in uncommon
senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction to his
diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and
artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination has
seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that "as the
fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the all-encompassing
rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries
of rhetoric they become invisible".[1] What Longinus says of "sublimity"
is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination with
exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in Gray's