In the misty sun-warm water.

This introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through
various scenes of natural beauty. It is long and elaborate--the scenery
he conceives round the home where he and Pauline are to live. And it is
so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later
poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature; that it is here
done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. It begins
with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. Here is
a piece of it:

Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,
Half in the air, like[5] creatures of the place,
Trusting the elements, living on high boughs
That sway in the wind--look at the silver spray
Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract
Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here
With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come
Dive we down--safe! See, this is our new retreat
Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs,
Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down
To a small pool whose waters lie asleep,
Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants:
And tall trees overarch to keep us in,
Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,
And in the dreamy water one small group
Of two or three strange trees are got together
Wondering at all around--

This is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the
whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with
interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes
even more feeble. Yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power,
like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. The chief thing to
say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as
fast as he could. He never tried it again, but passed on to suggest the
landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured words; choosing out one or two
of its elements and flashing them into prominence. The rest was left to
the imagination of the reader.

He is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the
clear air and open landscape:

Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods!
See, they part like a ruined arch: the sky!
Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
Floating away in the sun in some north sea.
Ai