--'Idyll', xxii., 48 'seq.'

(And the muscles on his brawny arms close under the shoulder stood out
like boulders which the wintry torrent has rolled and worn smooth with
the mighty eddies.)

But there was another use to which Tennyson applied his accurate and
intimate acquaintance with the classics. It lay in developing what was
suggested by them, in unfolding, so to speak, what was furled in their
imagery. Nothing is more striking in ancient classical poetry than its
pregnant condensation. It often expresses in an epithet what might be
expanded into a detailed picture, or calls up in a single phrase a whole
scene or a whole position. Where in 'Merlin and Vivian' Tennyson
described

The _blind wave feeling round his long sea hall
In silence_,


he was merely unfolding to its full Homer's [Greek: kuma k_ophon]--"dumb
wave"; just as the best of all comments on Horace's expression, "Vultus
nimium lubricus aspici," 'Odes', I., xix., 8, is given us in Tennyson's
picture of the Oread in Lucretius:--


How the sun delights
To _glance and shift about her slippery sides_.

Or take again this passage in the 'Agamemnon', 404-5, describing