Page 130

Throughout the ages nature has restored to man his peace and tranquility, his sense of vastness and immensity, his love of the eternal, the infinite and the immortal. And as each man in his own soul arrives at this awareness, so may he simultaneously perceive what Wordsworth defined as

A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.[1]

It is the immanence of God in nature that is thus felt and for the man who has come to this revelation, nature appears translucent. It is seen as the vesture of God. in his study of nature in art, Kenneth Clark writes:

As soon as men look with pleasure at the actual details of nature, the symbolising habit of mind gives to their regard an unusual intensity; for they look at flowers and trees not only as delightful objects, but as prototypes of the divine .[2]

It is this belief which characterised the nature mysticism of nineteenth century Romantic literature and which later influenced the American transcendentalists. Wordsworth's "natural piety," for example, corresponds with Whitman's mood in his poem "The Mystic Trumpeter":

A holy calm descends like dew upon me,
I walk in cool refreshing night the walks of Paradise ... [3]