"leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and twisted boughs of some
tall mountain-tree;" or be a fish, breathing the morning air in the misty
sun-warm water. Close following this is another memorable passage,
that beginning "Night, and one single ridge of narrow path;"
which has a particular interest for two notes of a deeper and broader music
to be evolved long afterwards. For, as it seems to me, in

"Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell
Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting
Of thy soft breasts ----"

(where, by the way, should be noticed the subtle correspondence
between the conceptive and the expressional rhythm) we have a hint
of that superb scene in "Pippa Passes", where, on a sinister night of July,
a night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest,
Ottima and Sebald lie amid the lightning-searcht forest,
with "the thunder like a whole sea overhead." Again,
in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan picture of morning,
over "the rocks, and valleys, and old woods," with the high boughs
swinging in the wind above the sun-brightened mists,
and the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks,
whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion,
an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music
in the poet's penultimate volume, beginning --

"But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight
Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree
Stir themselves from the stupor of the night,
And every strangled branch resumes its right
To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free