He then proceeds to describe the passionate fascination which nature exerted over his youth, and the change which had come over him by a deeper and more thoughtful communion with her spirit. When we consider that Wordsworth, at this time, was only twenty-eight, and that even the motions described in the first part of our extract had no existence in contemporary poetry, we can form some idea of his giant leap in advance of his age, as indicated by the unspeakable beauty and novelty of the concluding portion. Our readers will notice that although the style becomes almost transfigured by the intense and brooding imagination which permeates it, the diction is still as simple as prose: 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 colors and their forms, were then 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; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For 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 still 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 living things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear—both what they half create And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the muse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. It is this “sense sublime of something still more deeply interfused,” that gives to a well-known passage in the concluding portion of the poem its particular significance: