-

The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull;

or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness--

Nought was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe

or this--

There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky

or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--

Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread,
But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)
I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast.

He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen
processes of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, for
instance; as when he writes, in April--

A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance
than the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude--

A green and silent spot amid the hills,
A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place
No singing skylark ever poised himself--
But the dell,
Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate
As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax
When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,
The level sunshine glimmers with green light:--

The gust that roared and died away
To the distant tree--

heard and only heard
In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.

This curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till it
seems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood so
characteristic of the "Lake School"--occurs in an earnest political
poem, "written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion"; and
that silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears
of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place,
maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece.
Good political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanently
moving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those they
concern, have ceased to be open questi