Lo! the new-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light (With swimming phantom light o'erspread, But rimmed and circled with a silver thread) I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling The coming on of rain and squally blast. He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen processes of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, for instance; as when he writes, in April-- A balmy night! and though the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars. Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance than the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude-- A green and silent spot amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place No singing skylark ever poised himself-- But the dell, Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light:-- The gust that roared and died away To the distant tree-- heard and only heard In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass. This curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till it seems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood so characteristic of the "Lake School"--occurs in an earnest political poem, "written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion"; and that silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place, maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece. Good political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanently moving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those they concern, have ceased to be open questions, and are really beyond argument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on open questions. For although it was a great part of his intellectual ambition to subject political questions to the action of the fundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardent partisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics proper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, where there is still room for much difference of opinion. Yet The Destiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished, presents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, cast into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part of, the thought. France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to Liberty--