but the author of "Gwynedd," be it remembered, had never known the lotus land of Italy.
The blending of abstract and concrete throughout these poems is peculiarly interesting: Lionel Johnson's ideal beauty is not invariably wrapped in cloud or dazzling in the splendour of sunrise—it is both sought and found beneath some actual, earthly symbol. Hence this poet was increasingly given to the painting of word pictures, little vignettes of an almost Cowper-like nicety, which crystallise some momentary aspect of Nature with the soulful simplicity of Wordsworth himself. "In England" abounds in these sketches, as of
Hangs in a stilly trance,
or again of:
Riding the wind, the moon.
A thousand intimate recollections of Johnson's own rambles intensify the personal note, and very charmingly; he sings of the sea-gulls wheeling off in "a snowstorm of white wings," and of the shy rabbits who hopped away at his approach, the sunlight glowing "red their startled ears." Our poet once wrote that while he could but ill understand the temptation to worship the sun, he found entirely comprehensible that other temptation toward worship of the earth—"not with a vague, pantheistic emotion, but with a personal love for the sensible ground beneath his feet." It is impossible not to feel this tenderness, this sense of omnipresent kinship throughout his Nature pictures; in his love of the "freshness of early spray," and of sky and field and moor. The reality of it all reaches final expression in those poignant lines of "Cadgwith":
