Another aspect of the same idea, caught in a more lyrical mood, will be found in the poem called "The Trance." The poet is standing upon a hill-side alone at night, watching the "continual stars" and overawed by the vastness and "fixt law" of the universe. Then, in a sudden revelation of perhaps a fraction of a minute: I was exalted above surety And out of time did fall. As from a slander that did long distress, A sudden justice vindicated me From the customary wrong of Great and Small. I stood outside the burning rims of place, Outside that corner, consciousness. Then was I not in the midst of thee Lord God? ..... That, however, is the triumphant ecstasy of a moment. More often he is preoccupied with the duality in human nature, and in "An Escape" there is a fine simile of the struggle: Desire of infinite things, desire of finite. ... 'tis the wrestle of the twain makes man. --As two young winds, schooled 'mong the slopes and caves Of rival hills that each to other look Across a sunken tarn, on a still day Run forth from their sundered nurseries, and meet In the middle air.... And when they close, their struggle is called Man, Distressing with his strife and flurry the bland Pool of existence, that lay quiet before Holding the calm watch of Eternity. The incidence of finite and infinite is felt with equal force: sense is as powerful as spirit, and therein of course lives the keenness of the strife. In "Soul and Body" there is a passage--only one of many, however--in which the rapture of sensuous beauty is expressed. The spirit is imagined to be just ready to put off sense, to be for ever caught out of "that corner, consciousness." And the body reminds it: Thou wilt miss the wonder I have made for thee Of this dear world with my fashioning senses, The blue, the fragrance, the singing, and the green. ..... Great spaces of grassy land, and all the air One quiet, the sun taking golden ease Upon an afternoon: Tall hills that stand in weather-blinded trances As if they heard, drawn upward and held there, Some god's eternal tune; We may take our last illustration of this subject from a passage at the end of the volume called _Emblems of Love_. It is from a poem so rich in beauty and so closely wrought, that to quote from it is almost inevitably to do the author an injustice. But the same may be said about the whole book: while single poems from it will disclose high individual value, both as art and philosophy, their whole effect and meaning can only be completely seized by reading them as a sequence, and in the light of the conception to which they all contribute.