always
finds some exquisite meaning that is not written on the surface. It is idle
to specify or to quote lines on flowers or stars, on snow or vapor. Nothing
is ugly or commonplace in his world; on the contrary, there is hardly one
natural phenomenon which he has not glorified by pointing out some beauty
that was hidden from our eyes.

(4) It is the _life_ of nature which is everywhere recognized; not mere
growth and cell changes, but sentient, personal life; and the recognition
of this personality in nature characterizes all the world's great poetry.
In his childhood Wordsworth regarded natural objects, the streams, the
hills, the flowers, even the winds, as his companions; and with his mature
belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, it was
inevitable that his poetry should thrill with the sense of a Spirit that
"rolls through all things." Cowper, Burns, Keats, Tennyson,--all these
poets give you the outward aspects of nature in varying degrees; but
Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the impression of some personal
living spirit that meets and accompanies the man who goes alone through the
woods and fields. We shall hardly find, even in the philosophy of Leibnitz,
or in the nature myths of our Indians, any such impression of living nature
as this poet awakens in us. And that suggests another delightful
characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, namely, that he seems to awaken
rather than create an impression; he stirs our memory deeply, so that in
reading him we live once more in the vague, beautiful wonderland of our own
childhood.

Such is the philosophy of Wordsworth's nature poetry. If we search now for
his philosophy of human life, we shall find four more doctrines, which rest
upon his basal conception that man is not apart from nature, but is the
very "life of her life." (1) In childhood man is sensitive as a wind harp
to all natural influences; he is an epitome of the gladness and beauty of
the world. Wordsworth explains this gladness and this sensitiveness to
nature by the doctrine that the child comes straight from the Creator of
nature:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

In this exquisite ode, which he calls "