Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge:
In our life alone does nature live,
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.
[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._]
The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was;
his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the
philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own
toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret
of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's
personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his
conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, telling us,
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.
Perhaps Alice Meynell has best expressed the phenomenon, in a sonnet
called _The Love of Narcissus:_
Like him who met his own eyes in the river,
The poet trembles at his own long gaze
That meets him through the changing nights and days
From out great Nature; all her waters quiver
With his fair image facing him forever:
The music that he listens to betrays
His own heart to his ears: by trackless ways
His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavor.
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