And of this stuff the car’s creative ray
Wrapt all the busy phantoms that were there,
As the sun shapes the clouds, &c.’
Any thing more filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial than this, we have not seen; nor yet more full of morbid genius and vivifying soul. We cannot help preferring The Witch of Atlas to Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude; for, though the purport of each is equally perplexing and undefined, (both being a sort of mental voyage through the unexplored regions of space and time), the execution of the one is much less dreary and lamentable than that of the other. In the ‘Witch,’ he has indulged his fancy more than his melancholy, and wantoned in the felicity of embryo and crude conceits even to excess.
‘And there lay Visions, swift, and sweet, and quaint,
Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis;
Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint
With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;
‘And odours in a kind of aviary
Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept,