Let the passage be contrasted with
one in which wealth of imagery is in accordance with the thought it
expresses:--
"In the edifices of man there should be found reverent worship and
following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the
forest, and arches the vault of the avenue--which gives veining to the
leaf and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates
animal organisation but of that also which reproves the pillars of the
earth, and builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the
clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale
arch of the sky; for these and other glories more than these refuse not
to connect themselves in his thoughts with the work of his own hand;
the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some
Cyclopoan waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory
arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress
towns; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy
mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of
nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay
into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.
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