On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,

Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides

Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself

And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

If high the transport, great the joy I felt,

Communing in this sort through earth and heaven

With every form of creature, as it looked

Towards the Uncreated with a countenance

Of adoration, with an eye of love.”

“Towards the Uncreated,”—the looking thitherward through both Nature and his own moral being, so as to find both based on one Divine order, witnessing to one Eternal Being, this is one of Wordsworth’s deepest tendencies. This is his teaching in many forms, emphatically in the “Ode to Duty,” of which, after recognizing duty as the law of his own being, he exclaims,