s
expressed; there is no suggestion, as there should be in great poetry,
of something beyond all expression. And, curiously enough, this seems
to be true even of those fanciful poems so especially characteristic of
him, such as 'The Cloud' and 'Arethusa', where he has dashed together
on his palette the most startling colours in nature, and composed out of
them an extravagantly imaginative whole:

"The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead,
As on the jag of a mountain crag
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depths of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove."

Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and rainbows,
of sunset and moonshine, of spray and thunder and lightning? We hold our
breath; it is superhuman, miraculous; but he never falters, so vehement
is the impulse of his delight. It is only afterwards that we ask
ourselves whether there is anything beyond the mere delight; and
realising that, though we have been rapt far above the earth, we have
had no disturbing glimpses of infinity, we are left with a slight
flatness of disappointment.

But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which ecstasy
is shot through with that strain of melancholy which we have
already noticed. He invokes the wild West Wind, not so much to exult
impersonally in the force that chariots the decaying leaves, spreads the
seeds abroad, wakes the Mediterranean from its slumber, and cleaves the
Atlantic, as to cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and failure:

"Oh life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud."

Or an autumn day in the Euganean hills, growing from misty morning
through blue noon to twilight, brings, as he looks over "the waveless
plain of Lombardy," a short respite:

"Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery;
Or the Mariner, worn and wan,
Ne'er thus could voyage on."

The contrast between the peacefu