Opinion of this paragraph

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"It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces."

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This was posted on another forum in a thread about Lovecraft's work.  Someone jokingly remarked, "So there was a river in the garden, then?" and someone else said it sounds so overzealous that Lovecraft may well have plucked it from a poetry share thread.  Which got me thinking, writers who cut straight to the point are often considered bland in their style, but those who try to fill every possible space with imagery are typically called "try-hards."

Given the literary genius Lovecraft was for his time, I question whether those critiques are more of a reflection on the short attention spans people today have rather than an honest analysis of the work itself.  This becomes a problem to me, as a creative writer, when I try to balance how much to reveal versus how much to keep to the readers' imaginations.

What do our literature enthusiasts think?