William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) treated nature a bit differently than his fellow nature poets like, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake. Wordsworth’s mentionable works are 'The Prelude', 'Intimations of Immortality', 'Tintern Abbey' and 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud'.

Keats was bemused by the charm of nature as an abode of beauty; Shelley personified nature as a source of change; Blake depicted natural phenomena. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a match for Wordsworth, viewed supernaturalism in nature. Wordsworth's treatment of nature is far different from other Romantic poets. He was impressed not only by the outward beauty, but also found inner spiritual significance in nature.

Wordsworth idolised nature. In his famous poem and autobiography, 'The Prelude', he shows how unity is hidden in the diversity of creation. His creative imagination notices shadow of infinitude in the flux of natural course. So, every object of nature is significant, even a crude natural object can be celestial. In 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality' he apotheosizes nature: "To me the meanest flower that blows can give; Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Wordsworth believed our birth is an ephemeral sleep, to wake up in death to be united with macrocosmic reality. His mysticism finds concealed truth of God's teleology and cosmogony in ‘Intimations of Immortality’, he sounds most obsessive: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home."

Interestingly, Wordsworth views the sign of our existence and origin mixed in nature with an awe- inspiring presence, which is somewhat ineffable. Again in ‘Immortality’ ode, the poet strengthens his pantheistic belief: "The earth, and every common sight; To me did seem; Apparell'd in celestial light."

Wordsworth's pantheistic belief that "God is everything and everything is God" is the core of his major poems. Prelude showcases the poet's unyielding supposition that human capacity is limited to perceive the cause of unfathomable beauty that nature reflects.

Sometimes, the poet sounds surrealistic and the profundity of uncanny thoughts engulf him with utter uneasiness because the face of invisible becomes faintly visible in natural phenomenon: "And I have felt; A presence that disturbs me with the joy; Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime; Of something far more deeply interfused - A motion and a spirit, that impels; All thinking things, all objects of all thought; And rolls through all things."

This verse from ‘Tintern Abbey’ reminds us of Rabindranath Tagore's mystic poem ‘The Golden Boat’, where karma, or deeds of life, is taken away ignoring earthly life by a symbolic boat. The poet can't have a full view of the shadowy boat’s activity; so staying stranded, he remains spellbound: "Who is this, steering close to the shore; Singing? I feel that she is someone I know."

In the poem, Tagore in trance experiences a half-seen entity; a mysterious being that can never be known in a cloudy blackened rain drenched river backdrop. Furthermore, an all- encompassing essence in the bewildering beauty of nature unsettles Wordsworth in wonder. The best ever worshipper of nature comes to idealistic realisation that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her" (Tintern Abbey).

'The Prelude' remains significant for making things mystic. Wordsworth sees life in the lifeless. The whole seemingly motionless world seems to him animated with divine grace, an esoteric sense runs through his thoughts: "To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower; Even the loose stones that cover the highway; I gave a moral life: I saw them feel."

To Wordsworth hills, meadows, rivers, birds, flowers, trees all natural objects were touched by the glory of divinity. Wordsworth by his insight and imagination built a new doctrine; his thought and belief marked a new era in English literature. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, standing beside the Wye River he does not only observe immaculate beauty of nature, he also hears the sad music in the flow of river water that bears poisonous effect of industrialism. Nature which marks God's presence was being ravaged by man's greed that must have come as a shock to the poet.

So, the poet comes back again and again to the contact of nature, leaving hustle and bustle of manmade world to appease his soul with the purity of biotic care. Nature, pathetically, which is the shadow of cosmic sublimity, does not anymore hold the same grandeur that Wordsworth exalted so much. There lies now a big chasm between humans and nature. One can hardly get eternal solace because nature, which Wordsworth called his guide for spiritual solace, now is a mere slave to human rapacity. n