"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere" which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened 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' "Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn." William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone. He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's "Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly: "Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, His breath like caller air, His very foot has music in't, As he comes up the stair, For there's nae luck about the house, There is nae luck at a', There's little pleasure in the house When our gudeman's awa',"[33]