DIAMONDS IN LITERATURE 399
diamond, and the gem has been linked with it in prose
and poetry.
Tennyson saw it in the fountain:
" Till the fountain spouted, showering wide Sleet of diamond drift and pearly hail; "
and in his " Recollections of the Arabian Knights," he
says:
" From the green rivage many a fall Of diamond rillets musical."
In
" Maud," the great English poet, speculating over the humble life which
had inhabited a little shell on the sea-shore, places the bright stone
in a cluster of beautiful imagery:
"
The tiny shell is forlorn, Void of the little living will That made it
stir on the shore. Did he stand at the diamond door Of his house in a
rainbow frill? Did he push, when he was uncurled, A golden foot or a
fairy horn Thro' his dim water-world ? "
Blazing magnificence is pictured in another line by the same poet:
" In diamond light upspring the dazzling peaks."
The spell of which the spirits sing to the Oceanides in " Prometheus Unbound," is likened by Shelley to the diamond:
