may well have suggested Emerson's
"The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass."
"The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by comparison with either.
"Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:—
"All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence."
Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were original.
So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many moods, but with one pervading spirit:—
"Melting matter into dreams,
Panoramas which I saw,
And whatever glows or seems
Into substance, into Law."
We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:—
"The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to complete in your turn."