them; they were brief, they have gone, but they are mine forever.
The beauty and freshness that touched them morning after morning as the
dew touches the flower are henceforth a part of my life; they have
entered into my soul as their light and heat entered into the ripening
fruits and grains. I have come back to my friendly fire richer and
wiser for my absence from its cheer and warmth; my life has been
renewed at those ancient sources whence all our knowledge has come; I
have felt again the solitude and sanctity of those venerable shades
where the voices of the oracles were once heard, and fleeting glimpses
of shy divinities made a momentary splendour in the dusky depths.

Wordsworth's sonnets are always within reach of those who never get
beyond the compelling voice of nature, and who are continually
returning to her with a sense of loss and decline after every
wandering. As I take up the little, well-worn book, it opens of itself
at a familiar page, and I read once more that sonnet which comes to one
at times with an unspeakable pathos in its lines--a sense of permanent
alienation and loss:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like springing flowers--
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Almost unconsciously I repeat these lines aloud, and straightway the
fire, breaking into flame where it has been only glowing before,
answers them with a sudden outburst of heat and light that make a brief
summer in my study. When one goes back to the woods and streams after
long separation and absorption in books and affairs, he misses
something which once thrilled and inspired him. The meadows are
unchanged, but the light that touched them illusively, but with a
lasting and incommunicable beauty, is gone; the woodlands are dim and
shadowy as of old, but they are vacant of the presence that once filled
them. There is something painfully disheartening in coming back to
Nature and fi