Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of the English Church in this imaginative spirit. In one of his _Essays_, Newman describes how Keble had made the Church “poetical,” had “kindled hearts towards it,” and by “his happy magic” had thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a glamour and beauty of which they had for many generations been devoid. It was to the continuance and the furtherance of this process of regeneration and transfiguration that Newman devoted the Tractarian movement. But the essentially Romantic character of the new movement comes out in other ways than in its idealization of the Church. The relation of Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely akin to that of the Romanticists. Newman, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found Nature mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange significance, a divinely elaborated language whereby God speaks through symbols to the human soul. Keble’s _Christian Year_ is full of this interpretation of natural sights and sounds as images of spiritual truth, and with this mystical conception of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was for him as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as for Wordsworth or Shelley, and was as truly for him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment of God. But in interpreting the emotional value of Nature Newman had recourse to a symbolism drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mystical beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his imagination a Platonic ideal world, as with Shelley, or adumbrating the world of eternal verity of German transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and Coleridge, suggested the presence and power of seraphs and angels. Of the angels he says, “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.” Again, he asks, “What would be the thoughts of a man who, when examining a flower, or an herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting,--who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose,--nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he was so eager to analyze?”[27] Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism that pervades these passages, the mystical mood in the contemplation of Nature that underlies and suggests them is substantially the same that expresses itself through other imagery in the Romantic poets. In his intense sensitiveness, then, to the emotional value of the visible universe, and in his interpretation of the beauty of hill and valley and mountain and stream in terms of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be said to have shared in the Romantic Return to Nature.