In these sentences we find the new life and the old in the same mind. Such an action would have been impossible for a genuine son of the middle ages, but could Petrarch stand on a mountain top to-day, such an outcome of it would be equally impossible. His feeling for nature was intense even to a sense of the charm of ruggedness in hills, as Burckhardt, who refers to this letter in his work on _The Italian Renaissance_, shows by ample quotations; but the intense lover of nature in the nineteenth century, though his ethical sense be as deep as Wordsworth's, finds a different influence in such a scene. Indeed, read in Wordsworth himself, the modern contrast:
"Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay Beneath him; far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being, in them did he live, And by them did he live: they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request, Rapt into still communion, that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise."
How far apart is the piety of the two poets, how different their absorption. This identification of the human mood with Nature, and the spiritual elation that arises from the union, is thoroughly characteristic of the present century. Wordsworth's peculiar beauty, as Hartley Coleridge told Caroline Fox, "consisted in viewing things as amongst them, mixing himself up in everything that he mentions, so that you admire the man in the thing, the involved man." And Hartley's inspired father uttered a great criticism on the modern feeling for nature, when in the _Ode on Dejection_ he cried,
"Oh, lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth nature live."
No literary contemporaries were ever more apart than Wordsworth and Byron, yet _Childe Harold_ has the same note:
"I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me _High mountains are a feeling_. . . . . the soul can flee And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle and not in vain."