As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards each other approached the heroes. The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling of Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark is the plain of death. Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism. In _The Influence of Natural Objects_ he described how a life spent with Nature had early purified him from passion: Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me With stinted kindness. In November days, When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights, When by the margin of the trembling lake Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went In solitude, such intercourse was mine. 'Twas mine among the fields both day and night, And by the waters all the summer long, And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile, The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, I heeded not the summons.... Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging while the stars Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in _Tintern Abbey_: Nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all. 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, The colours 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, or any interest Unborrow'd from the eye. Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank pantheism of Byron. What Scott had been doing for Scotland,[14] and Moore for Ireland, Wordsworth, with still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for England and her people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook home to range more widely, or Southey, whose _Thalaba_ begins with an imposing description of night in the desert: How beautiful is night! A dewy freshness fills the silent air, No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain Breaks the serene of heaven; In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine Rolls through the dark blue depths. Beneath her steady ray The desert-circle spreads Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky. How beautiful is night!