The gold moted wood-pools pellucid as her eyen.
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Snow peaks arise enrobed in rosy shadows.
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Tawny like pure honey.
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Fragile as frost pansies.
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Rubies, pale as dew ponds stained with slaughter.
How luminous, translucent, yet graphic and vivid, are all those colorful lines. They are the ‘painting’ of a poet who has, above all things, the eye of the naturalist and also a fairy fantasy. If in those lines we find in Scott a genius for exquisite and translucent verbal coloring, corresponding to the art of Constable or Corot in imaginative vision or fantasy, we discover the romantic pigmentation of Rossetti (as a painter) and the rich luminous impressionism of Monet, in the lines following the final apostrophe to Beauty in Scott’s noble Ode for the Keats’ Centenary:—