The personification of Nature in this poem is at the farthest removed from the traditional poetic fiction which peopled the world with Dryads and Nymphs and Oreads. Nor has it any touch of the “pathetic fallacy” which imposes the thoughts and feelings of man upon natural objects. It presents unconsciously, very simply, and yet prophetically, Wordsworth’s vision of Nature,—a vision whose distinctive marks are vitality and unity. It is his faith that “every flower enjoys the air it breathes.” It is also his faith that underlying and animating all this joy there is the life of one mighty Spirit. This faith rises to its most magnificent expression in the famous _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_: “And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thought; 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: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.” The union of this animating Spirit of Nature, with the beholding, contemplating, rejoicing spirit of man is like a pure and noble marriage, in which man attains peace and the spousal consummation of his being. This is the first remedy which Wordsworth finds for the malady of despair, the first and simplest burden of his prophecy of joy. And he utters it with confidence, “Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings.” IV Side by side with this revelation of Nature, and interwoven with it so closely as to be inseparable, Wordsworth was receiving a revelation of humanity, no less marvellous, no less significant for his recovery of joy. Indeed he himself seems to have thought it the more important of the two, for he speaks of the mind of man as “My haunt and the main region of my song”; And again he says that he will set out, like an adventurer, “And through the human heart explore the way; And look and listen—gathering whence I may, Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.”