and composed out of them an extravagantly imaginative whole:

"The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead,
As on the jag of a mountain crag
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depths of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove."

Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and
rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of spray and thunder and
lightning? We hold our breath; it is superhuman, miraculous;
but he never falters, so vehement is the impulse of his
delight. It is only afterwards that we ask ourselves whether
there is anything beyond the mere delight; and realising that,
though we have been rapt far above the earth, we have had no
disturbing glimpses of infinity, we are left with a slight
flatness of disappointment.

But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which
ecstasy is shot through with that strain of melancholy which we
have already noticed. He invokes the wild West Wind, not so