which it would seem that nature has not made."[F]

[F] De Senancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.

Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless
significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere
and moral significance,--a 'lonely cheer.'

"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning."[G]

[G] The Prelude, Book III.

"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence
in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of
which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never
could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader
who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses
in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a
heart-satisfying authority:--

"Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,--
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields."

"Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]

[H] The Prelude, Book IV.

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus
to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors,
tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and
lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish
personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what
was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. And yet that
inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the
souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.

Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document
entitled The Story of