"Her form portray'd within the lucid stream Will oft appear, or on the verdant lawn, Or glossy beech, or fleecy cloud, will gleam So lovely fair, that Leda's self might say, Her Helen sinks eclipsed, as at the dawn A star when cover'd by the solar ray: And, as o'er wilds I stray, Where the eye nought but savage nature meets, There Fancy most her brightest tints employs; But when rude truth destroys The loved illusion of those dreamed sweets, I sit me down on the cold rugged stone, Less cold, less dead than I, and think and weep alone. "Where the huge mountain rears his brow sublime, On which no neighbouring height its shadow flings, Led by desire intense the steep I climb; And tracing in the boundless space each woe, Whose sad remembrance my torn bosom wrings. Tears, that bespeak the heart o'erfraught, will flow. While viewing all below, From me, I cry, what worlds of air divide The beauteous form, still absent and still near! Then chiding soft the tear, I whisper, low, haply she, too, has sigh'd That thou art far away; a thought so sweet Awhile my labouring soul will of its burden cheat. "Go thou, my song, beyond that Alpine bound, Where the pure smiling heavens are most serene: There, by a murmuring stream, may I be found, Whose gentle airs around Waft grateful odours from the laurel green; Nought but my empty form roams here unblest. There dwells my heart with her who steals it from my breast."[41] Petrarch's Italian poetry, written either to please his lady or to relieve the overflowing of his hearty bears in every line the stamp of warm and genuine, though of refined and chivalric, passion. It has been criticised as too imaginative, and defaced by conceits: of the latter there are a few, confined to a small portion of the sonnets. They will not be admired now, yet, perhaps, they are not those of the poems which came least spontaneously from the heart. Those have experienced little of the effects of passion, of love, grief, or terror, who do not know that conceits often spring naturally from such. Shakspeare knew this; and he seldom describes the outbursts of passion unaccompanied by fanciful imagery which borders on conceit. Still more false is the notion, that passion is not, in its essence, highly imaginative. Hard and dry critics, who neither feel themselves nor sympathise in the feelings of others, alone can have made this accusation: these people, whose inactive and colourless fancy naturally suggests no new combination nor fresh tint of beauty, suppose that is a cold exercise of the mind, when "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven."