w had distinct fragrances.
I knew when I woke in the morning from which direction the wind came,
by its odour; the wind from the moorland brought the scent of heather
and wild thyme, the wind from the glen the scent of water.

It was the same with sound. Properly speaking there is no such thing
as silence in Nature. The silence, or what seems silence, is divisible
into a multitude of minute sounds. Everything in Nature is toiling and
straining at its task, the sap in the tree, the rock balanced on its
bed of clay, the grass-blade pushing and urging its way toward the sun.
And as there is no real silence, so there is no real solitude in a
world where every atom is vigorously at work. Wordsworth's conception
of Nature as a Presence becomes at once intelligible when we live close
to the heart of Nature. Had Wordsworth lived in towns his poetry could
never have been written, nor can its central conception of Nature as a
Presence be understood by the townsman. I had often enough read the
wonderful lines--

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
_A motion and a spirit_, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

But I never really understood them till I lived among scenes similar to
those in which they were composed. And the organ by which they were
interpreted was not the mind so much as the senses, quickened and
invigorated by solitude. I presented a more sensitive surface to
Nature, and the instant result was the perception of Nature as of
something alive. In the silence of the night, as I stood at my door, I
felt the palpitation of a real life around me; the sense, as I have
said, of a breathing movement, of pulsation, of a beating heart, and
then I knew that Wordsworth wrote with strict scientific accuracy, and
not with vague mysticism as is commonly supposed, when he described
Nature as a living Presence.

The sum of these sensations was for me a state of physical beatitude.
I was often reminded of the grim confession of the poor wastrel, who,
when asked where he lived, replied, 'I don't live, I linger.' I had
never really lived; I had lingered. I had trodden the path of the days
and years with reluctant