Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy; _for she can so inform_ _The mind that is within us, so impress_ _With quietness and beauty, and so feed_ _With lofty thoughts_, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
In Wordsworth’s use of the word nature, it must always be borne in mind that he means, to use his own phrase,
The Original of human art, _Heaven-prompted_ Nature.
This poem enables us to understand the process by which so peculiar a nature as Wordsworth’s grew up into its spiritual stature. It was by placing his mind in direct contact with natural objects, passively receiving their impressions in the still hours of contemplation, and bringing his own soul into such sweet relations to the soul of nature as to “see into the life of things;” or, as he expresses it, in another connection, “his soul had _sight_” of those spiritual realities, of which visible forms and hues are but the embodiment and symbolical language. Nature to him was therefore always _alive_, spiritually as well as visibly _existing_; and he felt the correspondence between his own life and her life, from perceiving that one spirit penetrated both. Not only did he perceive this, but he mastered the secret alphabet by which man converses with nature, and to his soul she spoke an audible language. Indeed, his mind’s ear was even more acute than his mind’s eye; and no poet has excelled him in the subtle perception of the most remote relations of tone. Often, when he is on the peaks of spiritual contemplation, he hears voices when he cannot see shapes, and mutters mystically of his whereabouts in words which suggest rather than embody meaning. He grew in spiritual strength and height by assimilating the life of nature, as bodies grow by assimilating her grosser elements; and this process was little disturbed by communion with other minds, either through books or society. He took nothing at second-hand; and his nature is therefore not the nature of Homer, or Dante, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Scott, but essentially the nature of Wordsworth, the nature which he saw with his own eyes, and shaped with his own imagination. His humanity sprung from this insight, for not until he became impressed with the spirit of nature, and divined its perfect adaptation to nourish and elevate the human mind, did he perceive the worth and dignity of man. Then simple humanity assumed in his mind a mysterious grandeur, and humble life was spiritualized by his consecrating and affectionate imagination. He might then say, with something of a proud content,