In both the great revivals of literature, the very material of poetry was allegory.
The father falls asleep on his child's grave, and has a dream, or rather a vision, of a country where everything--after the childish imagination which invents differences instead of discovering harmonies--is super-naturally beautiful: rich rocks with a gleaming glory, crystal cliffs, woods with blue trunks and leaves of burnished silver, gravel of precious Orient pearls, form the landscape, in which are delicious fruits, and birds of flaming colours and sweet songs: its loveliness no man with a tongue is worthy to describe.

He comes to the bank of a river: Swinging sweet the water did sweep With a whispering speech flowing adown; (Wyth a rownande rourde raykande aryght) and the stones at the bottom were shining like stars.

It is a noteworthy specimen of the mode in which the imagination works when invention is dissociated from observation and faith.

But the sort of way in which some would improve the world now, if they might, is not so very far in advance of this would-be glorification of Nature.

The barest heath and sky have lovelinesses infinitely beyond the most gorgeous of such phantasmagoric idealization of her beauties; and the most wretched condition of humanity struggling for existence contains elements of worth and future development inappreciable by the philanthropy that would elevate them by cultivating their self-love.
At the foot of a crystal cliff, on the opposite side of the river, which he cannot cross, he sees a maiden sitting, clothed and crowned with pearls, and wearing one pearl of surpassing wonder and spotlessness upon her breast.