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Those lines composed above Tintern Abbey, in which 

 Wordsworth describes the two phases of nature-worship he 

 had lived through the earlier glowing and unreasoned, 

 corresponding to the heat of youthful ardour ; the later 

 reflective and religious, persisting through the 'years that 

 bring the philosophic mind ' have been so often recited 

 that they dwell in the hearts of every one. 



Nature then 



(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, 

 And their glad animal movements all gone by) 

 To me was all in all I cannot paint 

 What then I was. The sounding cataract 

 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 

 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 

 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 

 An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 

 That had no need of a remoter charm, 

 By thought supplied, nor any interest 

 Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, 

 And all its aching joys are now no more, 

 And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 

 Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other gifts 

 Have followed ; for such loss, I would believe, 

 Abundant recompence. For I have learned 

 To look on nature, not as in the hour 

 Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 

 The still sad music of humanity, 

 Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 

 To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 

 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 

 Of something far more deeply interfused, 

 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

 And the round ocean and the living air, 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 

 A motion and a spirit, that impels 

 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

 And rolls through all things. 



Thus with Wordsworth the youth's love, simple and 

 sensuous, for the beauty of the world became in manhood 

 a deep mystic insight, piercing behind the veil of nature to 



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