Or on the beached margent of the sea’?
If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers, or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage could have been written. Certainly the descriptions of nature made in what Matthew Arnold calls ‘the faithful way,’ or in what he calls ‘the Greek way,’ would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or paved fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing more. When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and brightness to nature—
‘What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn’;
when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way—
‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’;
when Virgil wrote in the Greek way—
‘Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,’