not true for
all. How fresh these lines from an address to his muse by
Wither:

"By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,--
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man."

Surely this is the voice of Wordsworth in Tudor phraseology.
Still more startling is this passage from Marvell, out of the
midst of the Commonwealth days: so remarkable is its Nature
Mysticism and its Wordsworthian feeling and insight, that it
must be given without curtailment. It occurs in the poem on the
"Garden."

"Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade,
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light."

Every line of this extract is worthy of close study--not only for
its intrinsic beauty, but for its evidence of the working of the
immanent ideas, and the vivid sense of kinship with tree life.
The two lines

"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade,"

are justly famous. But more significant are the three less known
ones:

"Casting the body's vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings."

Did Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or Shelley, ever give token of a
more vivid sense of kinship with the life of the tree? Is it not
palpable that the same essential form of intuitive experience is
struggling in each and all of these poets to find some fitting
expression? For Marvell, as for Wordsworth,

"The soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs"

seemed to fluctuate with an interior life and to call for joyous
sympathy.

Or, finally, study these passages from Walt Whitman, the sturdy
Westerner; his feeling for the mystic impulses from tree life is
exceptional, if not in its intensity, at any rate in his
determination to give it utterance. I