nameless translator

Here also let me digress. How do the poets do it? (I do not mean where do they get their power, as I was asking just now of Shakespeare, but how do the words, simple or complex, produce that effect?) Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence, and expand out into completion and into manhood.
Catullus does it. He does it so powerfully in the opening lines of
Vesper adest...
that a man reads the first couplet of that Hymeneal, and immediately perceives the Apennines.The nameless translator of the Highland song does it, especially when he advances that battering line -
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
They all do it, bless their hearts, the poets, which leads me back again to the mournful reflection that it cannot be done in prose ...Little friends, my readers, I wish it could be done in prose, for if it could, and if I knew how to do it, I would here present to you that Unknown Country in such a fashion that every landscape which you should see henceforth would be transformed, by the appearing through it, the shining and uplifting through it, of the Unknown Country upon which reposes this tedious and repetitive world.