Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the object and his imagination beyond it.
Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness, a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility, to
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 make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long. When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready.
Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about
“The smell of violets hidden in the green.”
Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. Most of his descriptions in this region are vague and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant. Colour-words are comparatively rare in his poems. Yellow, I think, was his favourite, if we may judge by the flowers that he mentioned most frequently. Yet more than any colour he loved clearness, transparency, the diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light of sunset
“that imbues
Whate’er it strikes with gem-like hues.”
But in two things his power of observation was unsurpassed, I think we may almost say, unrivalled:
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 in sound, and in movement. For these he had what he describes in his sailor-brother,
“a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch.”
In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet describing the stillness of the world at twilight, he says:
“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel;
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass,
The horse alone seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his evening meal.”
At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting of the owls and mocking them, there comes an interval of silence, and then
“a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents.”
At midnight, on the summit of Snowdon, from a rift in the cloud-ocean at his feet, he hears
“the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.”
Under the shadows of the great yew-trees of Borrowdalek he loves
“To lie and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.”
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What could be more perfect than the little lyric which begins
“Yes, it was the mountain echo
Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to the shouting cuckoo
Giving to her sound for sound.”
How poignant is the touch with which he describes the notes of the fiery-hearted Nightingale, singing in the dusk:
“they pierce and pierce;
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!”
But at sunrise other choristers make different melodies:
“The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.”
Wandering into a lovely glen among the hills, he hears all the voices of nature blending together:
“The Stream, so ardent in its course before,
Sent forth such sallies of glad sound that all
Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice
Of common pleasure: beast and bird, the lamb,
The shepherd’s dog, the linnet and the thrush
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Vied with this waterfall, and made a song,
Which while I listened, seemed like the wild growth
Or like some natural produce of the air
That could not cease to be.”
Wordsworth, more than any other English poet, interprets and glorifies the mystery of sound. He is the poet who sits oftenest by the Ear-Gate listening to the whispers and murmurs of the invisible guests who throng that portal into “the city of Man-Soul.” Indeed the whole spiritual meaning of nature seems to come to him in the form of sound.
“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.
One song they sang, and it was audible,
Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear,
O’ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,
Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed.”
No less wonderful is his sense of the delicate motions of nature, the visible transition of form and outl............