We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the ’Stanzas written in dejection near Naples,’ which contain the beautiful line which proved so prophetic of his death: 

  The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
  The waves are dancing fast and bright;
  Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
  The purple noon’s transparent might.... 
  I see the deep’s untrampled floor
  With green and purple sea-weeds strewn;
  I see the waves upon the shore
  Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown.... 
  Yet now despair itself is mild,
  Even as the winds and waters are;
  I could lie down like a tired child
  And weep away the life of care
  Which I have borne, and yet must bear,—­
  Till death like sleep might steal on me,
  And I might feel in the warm air
  My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
  Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

In his Essay on Love, speaking of the irresistible longing for sympathy, he says: 

In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, and the water and the sky.  In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.  There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.

As Brandes says:  ’His pulses beat in secret sympathy with Nature’s.  He called plants and animals his dear sisters and brothers, and the words which his wife inscribed upon his tombstone in Rome, “cor cordium,” are true of his relation to Nature also.’

The Cloud, with its marvellously vivid personification, is a perfect example of his genius.

It gives the measure of his unlikeness to the more homekeeping imaginations of his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and Moore; and at the same time to Byron, for here there are no morbid reflections; the poem is pervaded by a naive, childlike tone, such as one hears in the old mythologies.

The Cloud: 

  I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
  From the seas and the streams;
  I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
  In their noonday dreams. 
  From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
  The sweet buds every one,
  When rocked to rest on their Mother’s breast
  As she dances about the sun. 
  I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
  And whiten the green plains under;
  And then again I dissolve it in rain,
  And laugh as I pass in thunder.