33.  FAIRY WATER-BREAKS=_wavelets, ripples_. Cf.:—­

Many a silvery water-break
Above the golden gravel. 
Tennyson, The Brook.

36.  FLEECED WITH MOSS.  Suggest a reason why the term “fleeced” has peculiar appropriateness here.

39-40.  Paraphrase these lines to bring out their meaning.

43-48.  THEN UP I ROSE.  Contrast this active exuberant pleasure not unmixed with pain with the passive meditative joy that the preceding lines express.

47-48.  PATIENTLY GAVE UP THEIR QUIET BEING.  Notice the attribution of life to inanimate nature.  Wordsworth constantly held that there was a mind and all the attributes of mind in nature. Cf. l. 56, “for there is a spirit in the woods.”

53.  AND SAW THE INTRUDING SKY.  Bring out the force of this passage.

54.  THEN, DEAREST MAIDEN.  This is a reference to the poet’s Sister, Dorothy Wordsworth.

56.  FOR THERE IS A SPIRIT IN THE WOODS. Cf.  Tintern Abbey, 101 f.

      A motion and a spirit that impels
      All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
      And rolls through all things.

INFLUENCE OF NATURAL OBJECTS

  Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! 
  Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought! 
  And giv’st to forms and images a breath
  And everlasting motion! not in vain,
  By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn 5
  Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
  The passions that build up our human soul;
  Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man: 
  But with high objects, with enduring things,
  With life and nature:  purifying thus 10
  The elements of feeling and of thought,
  And sanctifying by such discipline
  Both pain and fear,—­until we recognize
  A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

  Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me 15
  With stinted kindness.  In November days,
  When vapors 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, 20
  Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went
  In solitude, such intercourse was mine: 
  Mine was it in the fields both day and night,
  And by the waters, all the summer long. 
  And in the frosty season, when the sun 25
  Was set, and, visible for many a mile,
  The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
  I heeded not the summons:  happy time
  It was indeed for all of us; for me
  It was a time of rapture!  Clear and loud 30
  The village clock tolled six—­I wheeled about,
  Proud and exulting like an untired horse,
  That cares not for his home,—­All shod with steel