The first sample paragraph is a comparison of A.E. Housman's "On Wenlock Edge" and Theodore Roethke's "Dolor." It uses the "Tennis-Ball" method and is wrong!
Houseman talks about the eternal nature of men's troubles whereas Roethke talks about the "dolor" of modern business life. Houseman uses details of woods, gales, snow, leaves, and hills, whereas Roethke selects details of pencils, boxes, paper-weights, mucilage, and lavatories. Houseman's focus is therefore on the torments of man close to Nature; Roethke's on civilized, ordered, duplicated, grey-flanneled man. Housman states that the significance of human problems fades in the perspective of eternity; Roethke does not mention eternity but makes men's problems seem even smaller by showing that business life has virtually erased human emotion.
The second example uses nature as a basis of comparison in William Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us" and Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur." It uses the correct technique.
Hopkins's ideas are Christian, though not genuinely other-worldly. (2) God is a God of the world for Hopkins, and "broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings" (line 14); Hopkins is convinced that God is here and everywhere, for his first line triumphantly proclaims this. (3) Wordsworth, by contrast, is able to perceive the beauty of Nature, but feels that God in the Christian sense has deserted him. (4) Wordsworth is to be defended here, though, because his wish to see Proteus or to hear Triton is not pagan. (5) He wants, instead, to have faith, to have the conviction that Hopkins so confidently claims. (6) Even if the faith is pagan, Wordsworth would like it just so he could have firm, unshakable faith. (7) As a matter of fact, however, Wordsworth's perception of Nature gives the contradiction to the lack of faith he claims. (8) His God is really Nature itself. (9) Hopkins's more abstract views of Nature make me feel that the Catholic believes that Nature is only a means to the worship of God. (10) For Hopkins, God is supreme; for Wordsworth, Nature is.
H and W stand for Hopkins and Wordsworth. The paragraph may be schematized as follows (numbers refer to sentences):