NATURE IN THE NATURE POETS. 
Is lightened; that serene and blessed mood 
In which the alFections gently lead us on " 
and we are enabled to 
" See into the life of things." 
And if this be too much to say, at the very least the scene 
has been a pleasure of memory, a rest for the spirit in the 
fever of life. 
He turns now to the present, but mainly to contrast it 
with the past. He feels that something has gone from him, 
a feeling which is more strongly expressed in the Immor- 
tality " Ode. He still ardently loves nature, but the feeling 
is softened since the days of youth, when 
" 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, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye." 
He has heard more of the still sad music of humanity," 
and is conscious of a presence in nature 
" That impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 
He concludes with an exquisite passage, full of that tender 
home affection, that love and friendship in holy union, which 
is so prominent both in Cowper and Wordsworth. li he 
were without that vision, he has still the presence of his 
dearest friend," his sister, to whom, in the same language, 
he had addressed one of his earliest poems, and whom he 
now meets on the banks of the sylvan Wye. He sees in her 
the same simple love of nature that once was his, and he 
