"[24]

In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by
Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving
expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth
pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In
_The Prelude_ he says:--

"To unorganic natures were transferred
My own enjoyments."

Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his
individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to
sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces
might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song
in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, _The
Cloud_, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the
song:--

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
* * * * *
I sift the snow on the mountains below
And their great pines groan aghast."

He thus begins the song, _To a Skylark_--

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,"

and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."

He peoples the garden in his lyric, _The Sensitive Plant_, with
flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of
Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley
enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.

"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew."

The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the
sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless
Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the
rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have
imagined that garden.

In the exquisite _Ode to the West Wind_, he calls to that "breath of
Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:--

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
* * * * *
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness."

We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and
night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found