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'