At noon, when by the forest's edge
He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart,--he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!

On a fair prospect some have looked
And felt, as I have heard them say,
As if the moving time had been
A thing as steadfast as the scene
On which they gazed themselves away.

In all these passages, it will be observed, the emotion is educed
from Nature rather than added to her; she is treated as a mystic
text to be deciphered, rather than as a stimulus to roving
imagination. This latter mood, indeed, Wordsworth feels occasionally,
as in the sonnet where the woodland sights become to him "like a
dream of the whole world;" but it is checked by the recurring sense
that "it is our business to idealize the real, and not to realize
the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic clouds of sunset, he
feels for a moment ashamed to think that they are unrememberable--

They are of the sky,
And from our earthly memory fade away.

But soon he disclaims this regret, and reasserts the paramount
interest of the things that we can grasp and love.

Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,