Wordsworth's nature as moral teacher
Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson.
Wordsworth gives Chesterton a concrete point of comparison in ‘The Tables Turned’, first published in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Its speaker directs a bookish friend outside: ‘Let Nature be your teacher’ (line 16). More pointedly, lines 21–24 claim that a woodland impulse can teach more about human moral good and evil than the sages. This is the authority Chesterton disputes: whether a natural process or encounter can supply the standard by which people ought to act. Read the 1798 text.
But ‘solemn mother’ is an argumentative compression. The poem's birds are blithe, its wisdom comes through health, and its truth through cheerfulness; the scene contains much of the lightness Chesterton reserves for Francis. Nor does this one poem establish Wordsworth's entire theology or identify a direct source for Chesterton. It makes the contrast intelligible while showing its limit: the real disagreement here concerns nature's moral authority more than the presence or absence of delight. The inspected text is Texas A&M's online transcription presented as the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, pp. 186–188, rather than an unspecified modern collected edition.
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