And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because 'it will not give him leave to think on that _which hurts him more_.' So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions. But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the _Man_, the pigmy man, on it--and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;--it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that '_little world_ of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what 'makes him think that _a man_ is but _a worm_.' Doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail. And notwithstanding all the poetry of that passionate defiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. The contest between that little world of man and the great outdoor world of nature was too unequal. Compelled at last to succumb, yielding to 'the tyranny of the open night, that is _too rough_ for _nature to endure_--the night that frightens the very wanderers of the dark, and makes _them_ keep their caves, while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, that border line of the human conception which great Nature's pencil, in this Poet's hand, is always reaching and completing,-- '_Man's_ nature cannot carry The affliction nor _the fear_.'