Whose graves with sacred moss are strawn.
Blest were I, might I see with you
The glimmering night, the rosy dawn.
This is true lyric feeling, spontaneous, not forced. Many of his odes, and parts of the Messias, shew great love for Nature. There is a fine flight of imagination in The Festival of Spring:
Not into the ocean of all the worlds would I plunge--not hover where the first created, the glad choirs of the sons of light, adore, deeply adore and sunk in ecstasy. Only around the drop on the bucket, only around the earth, would I hover and adore. Hallelujah! hallelujah! the drop on the bucket flowed also out of the hand of the Almighty.
When out of the hand of the Almighty the greater earth flowed, when the streams of light rushed, and the seven stars began to be--then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty.
When a stream of light rushed, and our sun began to be, a cataract of waves of light poured, as adown the rock a storm-cloud, and girded Orion, then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty. Who are the thousandfold thousands, who all the myriads that inhabit the drop?...
But thou, worm of Spring, which, greenly golden, art fluttering beside me, thou livest and art, perhaps, ah! not immortal....
The storm winds that carry the thunder, how they roar, how with loud waves they stream athwart the forest! Now they hush, slow wanders the black cloud....
Ah! already rushes heaven and earth with the gracious rain; now is the earth refreshed....
Behold Jehovah comes no longer in storm; in gentle pleasant murmurs comes Jehovah, and under him bends the bow of peace.
In another ode, The Worlds, he calls the stars 'drops of the ocean.'
Again, in Death he shews the sense of his own nothingness, in presence of the overpowering greatness of the Creator:
Ye starry hosts that glitter in the sky,
How ye exalt me! Trancing is the sight
Of all Thy glorious works, Most High.