Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of nature.  In this province he was not without forerunners.  To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there was George Crabbe, who had published his Village in 1783—­fifteen years before the Lyrical Ballads—­and whose last poem, Tales of the Hall, came out in 1819, five years after The Excursion.  Byron called Crabbe “Nature’s sternest painter, and her best.”  He was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life.  He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse.  But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth,

  The light that never was, on sea or land,
  The consecration, and the poet’s dream.

In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an oak-tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says:  “I recollect distinctly the very spot where this struck me.  The moment was important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the deficiency.”  In later life he is said to have been impatient of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains, conceiving himself to have a monopoly of “the power of hills.”  But Wordsworth did not stop with natural description.  Matthew Arnold has said that the office of modern poetry is the “moral interpretation of Nature.”  Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth’s office.  To him Nature was alive and divine.  He felt, under the veil of phenomena,

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thought:  a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused.

He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of pantheism which identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who identify Nature with the soul of man.  This tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy.  He was no metaphysician.  In his rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza.  And in the autumn of 1798, after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two friends went together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year.  But the literature and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth.  He disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the romanticist Buerger above both Goethe and Schiller.