Spirit broken? Try William Wordsworth’s cure. Absorb yourself in Nature, as in 1793 he did, later reporting the effects with the following lines of his poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798:
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
(Quoted from page 37 of Ode on Immortality and Lines on Tintern Abbey, by William Wordsworth. Cassell & Company, 1885.)
For a brief biography of William Wordsworth, click here. For images of or relating to William Wordsworth, click here.
For images of Tintern Abbey, click here.
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