In the preface to Alastor, Shelley says that the subject of the poem represents a youth “led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe.... The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted.” In the introductory stanzas, Shelley asks this great parent, Nature, to inspire him that his “strain may modulate with murmurs of the air.” He tells us, too, “that every sight and sound from the vast earth and ambient air sent to his heart its choicest blessings.” Wordsworth says, in Lines on Tintern Abbey, that
Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
In the Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of the influence of nature as follows:
Wisdom and spirit of the universe!
That soul that art the eternity of thought.
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul.
This and the Intimations of Immortality remind us of the following passage in Queen Mab:
Soul of the Universe! eternal spring
Of life and death, of happiness and woe,
Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene
That floats before our eyes in wavering light,
Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison,
Whose chains and massy walls
We feel, but cannot see.
Wordsworth goes into the woods and hears a thousand notes all making sweet music, all in harmony. Furthermore, he feels that all living things, flowers and animals, are possessed of conscious life.
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
(Lines written in early spring.)
Nature is throbbing not only with life but with the spirit of love, a spirit that knits the whole world of living things together.
Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth.
(To my sister.)