Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things.  In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance,—­a ‘lonely cheer.’

 “To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
  Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
  I gave a moral life:  I saw them feel
  Or linked them to some feeling:  the great mass
  Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
  That I beheld respired with inward meaning."[G]

    [G] The Prelude, Book III.

“Authentic tidings of invisible things!” Just what this hidden presence in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions.  Yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart-satisfying authority:—­

                                “Magnificent
  The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
  Glorious as ere I had beheld.  In front
  The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
  The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
  Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
  And in the meadows and the lower grounds
  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,—­
  Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
  And laborers going forth to till the fields.”

 “Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
  My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
  Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
  Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
  A dedicated Spirit.  On I walked,
  In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]

    [H] The Prelude, Book IV.

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage.  It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth.  And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.

Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document entitled The Story of my Heart.  It tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him.  On a certain hill-top he says:—­