He was so, because from the beginning he saw things in colour, more than in light and shade.

It is well worth a reader's while to search him for colour-impressions.

I take one, for example, with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of gold and green: Fancy the Pampas' sheen! Miles and miles of gold and green Where the sunflowers blow In a solid glow, And--to break now and then the screen-- Black neck and eyeballs keen, Up a wild horse leaps between! Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them, like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented.

This he has done specially in two poems: _The Englishman in Italy_, where the vast shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and truth.

The second of these poems is _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the delightful character whom he invents to see them.