"Thought" reigns supreme, and does with Langland what he chooses. Langland is unconscious of what he is led to; his visions are for him real ones; he tells them as they rise before him; he is scarcely aware that he invents; he stares at the sight, and wonders as much as we do; he can change nothing; his personages are beyond his reach. There is therefore nothing prepared, artistically arranged, or skilfully contrived, in his poem; the deliberate hand of a man of the craft is nowhere to be seen. He obtains artistic effects, but without seeking for them; he never selects or co-ordinates; he is suddenly led, and leads us, from one subject to another, without any better transition than an "and thanne" or a "with that." And "thanne" we are carried a hundred miles away, among entirely different beings, and frequently we hear no more of the first ones. Or sometimes, even, the first reappear, but they are no longer the same; Piers Plowman personifies now the honest man of the people, now the Pope, now Christ. Dowel, Dobet and Dobest have two or three different meanings. The art of transitions is as much dispensed with in his poem as at the opera: a whistle of the scene-shifter--an "and thanne" of the poet--the palace of heaven fades away, and we find ourselves in a smoky tavern in Cornhill. Clouds pass over the sky, and sometimes sweep by the earth; their thickness varies, they take every shape: now they are soft, indolent mists, lingering in mountain hollows, that will rise towards noon, laden with the scent of flowering lindens; now they are storm-clouds, threatening destruction and rolling with thunder. Night comes on, and suddenly the blackness is rent by so glaring a light that the plain assumes for an instant the hues of mid-day; then the darkness falls again, deeper than before. The poet moves among realities and abstractions, and sometimes the first dissolve in fogs, while the second condense into human beings, tangible and solid. On the Malvern hills, the mists are so fine, it is impossible to say: here they begin and here they end; it is the same in the Visions.