Verona, by torchfire, seen from a window, is shown with the same quick flare out of darkness:—­

                    “Then arose the two

And leaned into Verona’s air, dead-still. 
A balcony lay black beneath until
Out, ’mid a gush of torchfire, grey-haired men
Came on it and harangued the people:  then
Sea-like that people surging to and fro
Shouted.”

Only Carlyle, in the most vivid moments of his French Revolution, has struck such flashes out of darkness.  And there are other splendours and rarities, not only in the evocation of actual scenes and things, but in mere similes, like this, in which the quality of imagination is of a curiously subtle and unusual kind:—­

      “As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
      Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot
      Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
      Enormous watercourse which guides him back
      To his own tribe again, where he is king: 
      And laughs because he guesses, numbering
      The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
      Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
      Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
      To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
      And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)
      That he has reached its boundary, at last
      May breathe;—­thinks o’er enchantments of the South
      Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
      Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
      In fancy, puts them soberly aside
      For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
      The likelihood of winning mere amends
      Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
      Then, from the river’s brink, his wrongs and he,
      Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
      Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon.”

And, while much of the finest poetry is contained in picturesque passages such as these, we find verse of another order, thrilling as the trumpet’s “golden cry,” in the passionate invocation of Dante, enshrining the magnificently Dantesque characterization of the three divisions of the Divina Commedia.

                        “For he—­for he,
      Gate-vein of this hearts’ blood of Lombardy,
      (If I should falter now)—­for he is thine! 
      Sordello, thy forerunner, Florentine! 
      A herald-star I know thou didst absorb
      Relentless into the consummate orb
      That scared it from its right to roll along
      A sempiternal path with dance and song
      Fulfilling its allotted period,
      Serenest of the progeny of God—­
      Who yet resigns it not!  His darling stoops
      With no quenched lights, desponds with no blank troops
      Of disenfranchised brilliances, for, blent
      Utterly with thee, its shy element