The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull;
or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness—
Nought was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe
or this—
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky
or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher—
Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread,
But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)
I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast.
He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen processes of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, for instance; as when he writes, in April—
A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.
Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance than the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude—