Long, lyrical sentences do have their place, but I'd argue that the best of them aren't as wordy as it might at first seem. Ray Bradbury was a magician in this regard:

"The producer listens and the old man listens in the drafty strutworks of the cathedral, with the moonlight blinding the eyes of the plaster gargoyles and the wind making the false stone mouths to whisper, and the sound of a thousand lands within a land below blowing and dusting and leaning in that wind, a thousand yellow minarets and milk-white towers and green avenues yet untouched among the hundred new ruins, and all of it murmuring its wires and lathings like a great steel-and-wooden harp touched in the night, and the wind bringing that self-made sound high up here in the sky to these two men who stand listening and apart." (from "The Meadow" by Ray Bradbury)

It's one vast image (which is the point), but it's also a string of pearls, each little polished orb contributing to the whole.