"I live not in myself; but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling," without thinking of Wordsworth's verses just quoted? And who can deny that Byron, as it were, adopted Wordsworth's idea, and added thoughts of his own to it when he wrote (_Childe Harold_, iii. 75):-- "Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part Of me and of my soul, as I of them? Is not the love of these deep in my heart With a pure passion? should I not contemn All objects, if compared with these?" Wordsworth, in _Tintern Abbey_, describes his passion for nature as something past, as something which only lasted for a moment during an age of transition, and very soon turned into reflection and questioning; but Byron's passion is a permanent feeling, the expression of his nature. In his case the Ego in its relations with nature is not forced into the strait-jacket of orthodox piety; no obstruction of dogma is set up between nature and him; in his mystical worship of it he feels himself one with it, and this without the help of any _deus ex machine_. Passion is not the special characteristic of Wordsworth's attitude to nature. The distinguishing quality in his perception and reproduction of natural impressions is of a more delicate and complex kind. The impression, although it is received by healthy, vigorously perceptive senses, is modified and subdued by pondering over it. It does not directly attune the poet to song. If Wordsworth can say, with Goethe: "I sing like the bird that sits on the bough," it is, at any rate, not like the nightingale that he sings; his is not the love-song which streams forth, rich and full, telling of the intoxication of the soul and breaking and mocking at the silence of the night. He himself, after describing the song of the nightingale in similar terms to these, adds (_Poems of Imagination_, x.):-- "I heard a stock-dove sing or say His homely tale this very day; His voice was buried among trees, Yet to be come at by the breeze; He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed; And somewhat pensively he wooed: He sang of love with quiet blending, Slow to begin, and never ending; Of serious faith and inward glee; That was the song--the song for me!"