Coffee would be
The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray,
or brown or black, as the rhyme demanded. A boot is dignified into
The shining leather that the leg encased.
Wine is
The purple honor of th’ ambrosial vine.
All women are “nymphs,” carriages are “harnessed pomps,” houses are sumptuous or humble “piles,” as the case may be, and everything is purely technical. Of nature there seems to have been hardly a tradition.
But instead of attempting to describe in prose the diluent diction which passed for poetic under the artificial system—which the influence of Wordsworth did more than anything else to abolish and destroy—I will do it by a few verses in the same style. Any subject will do—a Lapland sketch, we will say:
Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throw
O’er Lapland’s wastes of uncongenial snow,