The world is too much with us; late and soon Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The Winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea: Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. Wordsworth's own imagination idealized Nature in a different way. The sonnet "Brook! Whose society the poet seeks" places him among the men whose Nature-deities have not yet become anthropomorphic-- men to whom "unknown modes of being" may seem more lovely as well as more awful than the life we know. He would not give to his idealized brook "human cheeks, channels for tears,--no Naiad shouldst thou be,"-- It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, And hath bestowed on thee a better good; Unwearied joy, and life without its cares. And in the _Sonnet on Calais Beach_ the sea is regarded in the same way, with a sympathy (if I may so say) which needs no help from an imaginary impersonation, but strikes back to a sense of kinship which seems antecedent to the origin of man. It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea: Listen! The mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder--everlastingly. A comparison, made by Wordsworth himself, of his own method of observing Nature with Scott's expresses in less mystical language something of what I am endeavouring to say.