Well Robusto, I feel sure I won't convince you about the "great puffy clouds of fustian" you perceive in Smart's lines-- but I'll try to explain a couple of elements that make me disagree, using the line you quote.

First, I hear a generous comedy: the large terms and big gestures that you dislike, and that make you feel like a child pent up in church, are contrasted with beavers, prank, mice, all sorts of ordinary and not conventionally sacred materials. Smart means what he says, but he also likes grinning mischievously at the ordinary liturgical ways of saying it. The pard (a leopard, I take it) and the nail remind us that the Bible itself is not all decorum and dignity and priestly vestments.

Second, meaning. Smart is quite interested in violence and again refreshes Biblical material, the tremendous violence of Biblical narrative.He joins somewhat disparate elements-- the animal and the human, the military sword and the domestic nail (usually it's translated "tent-peg," I think)-- in a way that, as I hear it, tears away conventional orders of thing.

The proper names in this passage, and in the poem generally, seem to me much less straightforwardly heroic than the ship-names in the Odyssey. (Or the genealogies in the Bible.) There's an aware or self-aware absurdity in them, along with the absolute conviction that drives them.

Something like this comedy/conviction quality is what I take Allen Ginsberg to mean in the passage I quote in the thread started by David Gewanter. "Putting two words together that are unusual" says Ginsberg about Smart, Whitman, his own writing. That clashing or dissonant quality makes Smart's litany quite different from the Catholic service you recall, or from the Homeric catalogue of ships, I think.

Well as I have said, I don't expect to convert you to an enthusiast for Smart -- just want to respond, and make you feel welcome to the conversation. "Great puffy clouds of fustian"-- pretty good.