things in the language comparable to the miniatures of _Il Penseroso_.
Crashaw, Collins, Shelley--three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets
from three bounds of the one Pegasus! Collins's Pity, "with eyes of dewy
light," is near of kin to Shelley's Sleep, "the filmy-eyed"; and the
"shadowy tribes of mind" are the lineal progenitors of "Thought's crowned
powers." This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and
Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern
poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large
moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions. Take the passage
(already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come

From the temples high
Of man's ear and eye
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,

* * * * *

From those skiey towers
Where Thought's crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
Our feet now, every palm,
Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
And beyond our eyes
The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.

Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the
root of such a power. The root, we take it, is this. He had an
instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for