Although poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge share the same general response to mans' inability to connect with nature, Wordsworth, by the use of beauty, composed poetry based on the idea that nature teaches us (the common man) a lesson. He believed that God was present in the beautiful. God is nature, nature is the teacher. While Coleridge, however, took the darker side of nature, suggesting that, as adults, we do not seek out nature. Instead, it seems that nature seeks us. He believed that God could be found in the supernatural.
             Wordsworth's poem depicts the imagination as a means to reflect on the past and better understand and reconnect with a child-like spirituality. "Come into the light of things, let nature be your teacher." In other words, we must seek out our past link to nature and use our imaginations to help us be more aware of that spiritual relationship. Nature never leaves us and actually seems to haunt us. We cannot escape our connections with nature from the past. Wordsworth not only believed nature to be our teacher, he operated on inspiration, or the assumption that the only thing that can better a person is their environment. Therefore Wordsworth composed a landscape more beautiful than what had seen, out of forms of beauty treasured in his memory. In Michael, he asks, what are you without memories, or rather a nostalgic twinge, when you look back on your time spent with family or working for something meaningful?
             Opposed to the colorful imagery of Wordsworth, Coleridge seems to take the darker approach suggested that nature seeks us. In "Frost at Midnight" he is lamenting on the beauty of nature to his young son who is cradled in his arms, and is promising him that he will not have to grow up amidst the smog and strife of city life, but instead he will have the opportunity to "wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags of ancient mountains and beneath the clouds...."...