That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Walter Pater makes this remark in his critical essay on William Wordsworth, written in the late Victorian period when Romantic poetry was being reassessed through newer aesthetic and psychological lenses. Pater is contrasting Wordsworth’s characteristic “animism” or “nature-worship” with the more conventional poetic habit of personifying nature as a mere figure of speech. For Pater, Wordsworth’s descriptions of a living presence in landscapes and natural objects reflect a deeply felt, quasi-religious conviction rooted in the poet’s formative experiences in the Lake District and his lifelong habit of solitary walking and contemplation. The sentence occurs as part of Pater’s broader attempt to define Wordsworth’s distinctive imaginative sincerity and the sources of his poetic authority.

Pater argues that what many poets treat as decorative personification—speaking of woods, streams, or hills as if they had consciousness—was, for Wordsworth, close to an experiential truth. The claim elevates Wordsworth’s nature imagery from “rhetorical artifice” to something like testimony: the poet is not merely using a trope but registering a perceived vitality in the world. This helps explain the peculiar intensity and moral seriousness of Wordsworth’s nature poetry, where communion with the nonhuman world becomes a source of insight, consolation, and ethical formation. Pater’s phrasing also hints at a modern, psychological reading: Wordsworth’s imagination is so powerful and habitual that it makes the animation of nature feel “almost literal,” blurring the line between metaphor and lived perception.