‘Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven’s wide pathless way,’—
there is more intense observation, and intense feeling of nature (as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her), than in twenty volumes of descriptive poetry. But he added to his own observation of nature the splendid fictions of ancient genius, enshrined her in the mysteries of ancient religion, and celebrated her with the pomp of ancient names.
‘Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.
Oh! who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
Last came, and last did go,
The pilot of the Galilean lake.’