(4) It is the life of nature which is everywhere recognized; not mere growth and cell changes, but sentient, personal life; and the recognition of this personality in nature characterizes all the world’s great poetry.  In his childhood Wordsworth regarded natural objects, the streams, the hills, the flowers, even the winds, as his companions; and with his mature belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, it was inevitable that his poetry should thrill with the sense of a Spirit that “rolls through all things.”  Cowper, Burns, Keats, Tennyson,—­all these poets give you the outward aspects of nature in varying degrees; but Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the impression of some personal living spirit that meets and accompanies the man who goes alone through the woods and fields.  We shall hardly find, even in the philosophy of Leibnitz, or in the nature myths of our Indians, any such impression of living nature as this poet awakens in us.  And that suggests another delightful characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry, namely, that he seems to awaken rather than create an impression; he stirs our memory deeply, so that in reading him we live once more in the vague, beautiful wonderland of our own childhood.

Such is the philosophy of Wordsworth’s nature poetry.  If we search now for his philosophy of human life, we shall find four more doctrines, which rest upon his basal conception that man is not apart from nature, but is the very “life of her life.” (1) In childhood man is sensitive as a wind harp to all natural influences; he is an epitome of the gladness and beauty of the world.  Wordsworth explains this gladness and this sensitiveness to nature by the doctrine that the child comes straight from the Creator of nature: 

    Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
    The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
      Hath had elsewhere its setting,
        And cometh from afar: 
      Not in entire forgetfulness
      And not in utter nakedness,
    But trailing clouds of glory do we come
      From God, who is our home.

In this exquisite ode, which he calls “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), Wordsworth sums up his philosophy of childhood; and he may possibly be indebted here to the poet Vaughan, who, more than a century before, had proclaimed in “The Retreat” the same doctrine.  This kinship with nature and with God, which glorifies childhood, ought to extend through a man’s whole life and ennoble it.  This is the teaching of “Tintern Abbey,” in which the best part of our life is shown to be the result of natural influences.  According to Wordsworth, society and the crowded unnatural life of cities tend to weaken and pervert humanity; and a return to natural and simple living is the only remedy for human wretchedness.