That is an exquisite bit of naturalistic etching with a poetic meaning intrinsically in the picture of the Maiden Morn standing and dreaming in the mist. The picture itself delights both the visual faculty and the imagination. Campbell also possessed the faculty of painting vividly, as with a single sweep of the brush, as in his _Lake Huron_ (in October) and its memorable lines:— Miles and miles of lake and forest, Miles and miles of sky and mist; and these still more vivid lines:— Miles and miles of crimson glories, Autumn’s wondrous fires ablaze. Campbell did not aim or strive to be a word-virtuoso. But what he could achieve as an artist was to make at will a dainty or a glorious _picture_, and so _localize_ the picture that one can immediately tell which section of the Canadian land or waters is delineated. He surpassed all his contemporaries in the gift of ‘flashing’ a vivid picture in a single line, as, for instance:— The stars came out in _gleaming shoals_ or this tremendous line:— Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim. The last line quoted also discloses in Campbell a power which is not in any other Canadian poet—the Miltonic power of conveying by description ideated sensations of unending space and movement. Matching almost any piece of sheer description of immensity by Milton is Campbell’s compelling panorama of Lazarus in his flight from Heaven to Hell and the sensations of illimitable depths downward that it creates in the reader, as in these stanzas from his poem _Lazarus_:— Hellward he moved, like a radiant star shot out From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even, When Orion’s train and that mysterious seven Move on in mystic range from heaven to heaven. Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout. The liquid floor of heaven bore him up With unseen arms, as in his feathery flight He floated down toward the infinite night; But each way downward, on the left and right, He saw each moon of heaven like a cup Of liquid, misty fire that shone afar From sentinel towers of heaven’s battlements; But onward, winged by love’s desire intense, He sank, space-swallowed, into the immense, While with him ever widened heaven’s bar. ’Tis ages now long-gone since he went out, Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls. But hellward still he ever floats and falls, And ever nearer come those anguished calls; And far behind he hears a glorious shout. Campbell had a gift, too, for vivid color epithets and for vowel and alliterative word-melody. Indeed he was a master of color and verbal melody. Some of his more original and striking alliterative lines are:—