eds of pleasant green,
Where never yet was creeping creatures seen.

"Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played
And hurled everywhere their waters sheen;
That, as they bickered through the sunny glade,
Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made."

"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere"
which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to
say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what
the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened
by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The secret
of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind
cannot be translated into prose--as Pope's can--any more than music can
be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like
Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely
pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not
higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an
unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses
behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in
Milton's

"Airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."

There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle
of Indolence:"

"As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main
(Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles,
Or that aerial beings sometimes deign
To stand embodied to our sense plain),
The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain,
A vast assembly moving to and fro,
Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show."

It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides
or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at
in this passage--the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we
get to Keats'

"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn."

William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more
considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed,
with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone.
He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of
these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's
"Ken