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Critics have seen in Hopkins' use of the compound feature "a passionate emotion which seems to try to utter all its words in one": [43]

    Million-fueled, nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selved spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone![44]

Several different kinds of compound epithet are employed in these few lines. A noun head plus an instrumental verb, as in "million-fueled," adjective and verb in "clearest-selved" and the compound noun of "firedint." In this last example, Hopkins has unified his compound by omitting the hyphen, a move which disguises, in a daring way, the separate origins of the two words. The two words thus fused are arresting. Both have their roots in Old English, with the more archaic "dint," meaning force or power, serving to inscape the particular impression of man. Commenting on this word-making process in Hopkins, WH.Gardner writes:

The coining of words by a poet like Hopkins is sometimes the expression of primitive consciousness and sensibility and sometimes of a learned sophistication.[45]

Primitive, because the poet is returning to the origins of poetry as a welding of pictures; and sophisticated, because they are used by a poet who is fully conscious of the fact that he is arranging the older elements of expression in such a way as to make them all new

A striking feature of the pictures fused in this way by compound nouns is that they often assume the appearance of microcosmic universes. Even without being completed by a regular sentence structure, they define an intelligible process or movement.