"I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood. Their colours and their forms were thus to me An appetite; a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts Have followed. I have learned To look on nature not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes _The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue_. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." Our poet sounds all the chords. He does not muffle any; he honours Nature in her own simple loveliness, and in the beauty she wins from the human heart, as well as when she is informed with that sublime spirit "that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." Sit down, by all means, amongst the fern and the wild-flowers, and look out upon the blue hills, or near you at the flowing brook, and thank God, the giver of all this beauty. But what manner of good will you do by endeavouring to persuade yourself that these objects _are_ only beautiful because you give thanks for them?--for to this strange logical inversion will you find yourself reduced. And surely you learned to esteem and love this benevolence itself, first as a human attribute, before you became cognisant of it as a Divine attribute. What other course can the mind take but to travel through humanity up to God?