Note 198 — Chapter VIII · ROMANTICISM AND NATURE
Reading edition
It was especially easy for the poets to go for their landscapes to the painters because according to the current theory poetry was itself a form of painting (ut pictura poesis). Thus Thomson writes in The Castle of Indolence:
Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls, Bade the gay bloom of vernal landskips rise, Or autumn’s varied shades embrown the walls: Now the black tempest strikes the astonish’d eyes; Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies; The trembling sun now plays o’er ocean blue, And now rude mountains frown amid the skies; Whate’er Lorrain light touch’d with softening hue, Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew. (C. I, st. 38.)