While painting in these figures, he seems to reduce their proportions too much to the level of earthly life.

He quits his god-creating, heaven-compelling throne of mythopoeic inspiration, and descends to a love-story of Asia and Prometheus.

In other words, he does not sustain the visionary and primeval dignity of these incarnated abstractions; nor, on the other hand, has he so elaborated their characters in detail as to give them the substantiality of persons.

There is therefore something vague and hollow in both figures.

Yet in the subordinate passages of the poem, the true mythopoeic faculty--the faculty of finding concrete forms for thought, and of investing emotion with personality--shines forth with extraordinary force and clearness.