Timeline
William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey, published 1798 (Lyrical Ballads)
Wordsworth expresses here most completely the healing, sustaining moral and spiritual power of nature.
Nature has immediate presence for him now, but also as a "landscape" in the mind recalled much later "in hours of weariness", "mid the din/Of towns and cities".
Nature educates the soul in charity and comforts the mind when the world seems "unintelligible". Wordsworth has reached a more mature understanding: nature is perceived not in the egoistic appetite of youthful passion, but now in thought, nature becomes the humbling teacher of universal love and respect, the foundation of well-being, hope and progress, counteracting the temptation to "misanthropy" and loss of faith.