n November days,
When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made
A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods
At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
When by the margin of the trembling lake
Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine.
'Twas mine among the fields both day and night,
And by the waters all the summer long,
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile,
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons....

Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging

while the stars
Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in _Tintern
Abbey_:

Nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
The colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow'd from the eye.

Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank
pantheism of Byron.

What Scott had been doing for Scotland,[14] and Moore for Ireland,
Wordsworth, with still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for
England and her people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook
home to range more widely, or Southey, whose _Thalaba_ begins with an
imposing description of night in the desert:

How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air,
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven;
In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine
Rolls through the dark blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!

But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and
innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in
Rousseau became poetry in Byron.

There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring
spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were
melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect
liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and
uproarious side of