from their quality; each in itself is clearly seen and clearly recorded, with all the freshness of a personal impression:
Or where bitumen lakes
On black bare pointed islets ever beat
With sluggish surge.
·····If dewy morn and odorous noon and even,
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness,
Or autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns
Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs.
·····Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
·····
—these are no chosen passages, but such as were found on opening a Shelley at random. Or again, Blake, the most visionary of all poets, was ever the most precise in his visions—as precise as the Book of Revelations. What is distincter in its lurid light and darkness than
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the ardour of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand forged thy dread feet?
The same can be said of Coleridge's strange imaginings in The Ancient Mariner, of Christabel, even of Khubla Khan. Upon the basis of the invisible impossible, he builds up the
