Not only did his observant eye catch each variety of form, each passing tint of colour on his hills and valleys, he felt, as no poet before his time had done, the might and majesty of the forces by which, in the mountain-world, we are shown how the surface of the world is continually modified. 'To him was given Full many a glimpse of Nature's processes Upon the exalted hills.' The thought of these glimpses led to one of the noblest outbursts in the whole range of his poetry, where he gives way to the exuberance of his delight in feeling himself, to use Byron's expression, 'a portion of the tempest'-- 'To roam at large among unpeopled glens And mountainous retirements, only trod By devious footsteps; regions consecrate To oldest time; and reckless of the storm, ... while the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, ... and while the streams Descending from the region of the clouds, And starting from the hollows of the earth, More multitudinous every moment, rend Their way before them--what a joy to roam An equal among mightiest energies!' In this passage Wordsworth seems to have had what he would have called 'a foretaste, a dim earnest' of that marvellous enlargement of the charm and interest of scenery due to the progress of modern science. When he speaks of 'regions consecrate to oldest time,' he has a vague feeling that somehow his glens and mountains belonged to a hoary antiquity, such as could be claimed by none of the verdant plains around. Had he written half a century later he would have enjoyed a clearer perception of the vastness of that antiquity and of the long succession of events with which it was crowded.[51] It is curious to remember that three of the poets whom I have singled out as illustrations of the influence of our lowland, upland, and highland scenery upon our literature have held up the geologist to ridicule. Cowper put that votary of science into the pillory among the irreligious crowd, about whose ears the poet loved to 'crack the satiric thong.'[52] Wordsworth treated the geological enthusiast with withering scorn.[53] Scott, with characteristic good humour, only poked fun at him.[54] It was reserved for a poet of our own day to look below the technical jargon of the schools, and to descry something of this wealth of new interest which the landscape derives from a knowledge of the history of its several parts. But Tennyson only entered a little way into this enlarged conception of nature. There remains a boundless field for some future poetic seer, who letting his vision pierce into the past, will set before the eyes of men the inner meaning of mountain and glen.