see pp. 47 f.



INFLUENCE OF NATURAL OBJECTS

This poem was composed at Goslar in 1799 as part of the first book of
_The Prelude_ (published in 1850). It was first printed in Coleridge's
periodical _The Friend_, in December, 1809, with the instructive though
pedantic title, "Growth of Genius from the Influences of Natural Objects
on the Imagination, in Boyhood and Early Youth." It appeared in
Wordsworth's poems of 1815 with the following title:--"Influence of
Natural Objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in
Boyhood and Early Youth."

The opening verses of this poem are still another instance of the
identification of God with nature. As Mr. Stopford Brooke writes, "we
are here in contact with a Person, not with a thought. But who is this
person? Is she only the creation of imagination, having no substantive
reality beyond the mind of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic
impersonation of an actual Being, the form which the poet gives to the
living Spirit of God in the outward world, in order that he may possess a
metaphysical thought as a subject for his work as an artist."

_The Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey_ contain the highest expression
which Wordsworth has given to this thought, To the heedless animal
delight in nature had succeeded a season in his youth when the beauty and
power of nature "haunted him like a passion," though he knew not why.
The "dizzy rapture" of those moods he can no longer feel. Yet,