Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most apt, most expressive.
Milton thus opens the fifth book of “Paradise Lost:”—
“Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl.”
Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:—
“And jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.”
Keats begins “Hyperion” with these lines:
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn.”