Miles and miles of lake and forest,
Miles and miles of sky and mist;
and these still more vivid lines:—
Miles and miles of crimson glories,
Autumn’s wondrous fires ablaze.
Campbell did not aim or strive to be a word-virtuoso. But what he could achieve as an artist was to make at will a dainty or a glorious picture, and so localize the picture that one can immediately tell which section of the Canadian land or waters is delineated. He surpassed all his contemporaries in the gift of ‘flashing’ a vivid picture in a single line, as, for instance:—
The stars came out in gleaming shoals
or this tremendous line:—
Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim.
The last line quoted also discloses in Campbell a power which is not in any other Canadian poet—the Miltonic power of conveying by description ideated sensations of unending space and movement. Matching almost any piece of sheer description of immensity by Milton is Campbell’s compelling panorama of Lazarus in his flight from Heaven to Hell and the sensations of illimitable depths downward that it creates in the reader, as in these stanzas from his poem Lazarus:—