And flash’d as those
Dull-coated things, that making slide apart
Their dusk wing cases, all beneath there burns
A Jewell’d harness, ere they pass and fly.
—Gareth and Lynette.
So again:—
Wan-sallow, as the plant that feeds itself,
Root-bitten by white lichen.
—Id.
And again:—
All the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold.
—In Memoriam.
His epithets are in themselves a study: “the dewy-tassell’d wood,” “the tender-pencill’d shadow,” “crimson-circl’d star,” the “hoary clematis,” “creamy spray,” “dry-tongued laurels”. But whatever he describes is described with the same felicitous vividness. How magical is this in the verses to Edward Lear:—
Naiads oar’d
A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars.
Or this:—
She lock’d her lips: she left me where I stood:
“Glory to God,” she sang, and past afar,
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood,
Toward the morning-star.
—A Dream of Fair Women.
But if in the world of Nature nothing escaped his sensitive and sympathetic observation,—and indeed it might be said of him as truly as of Shelley’s Alastor