Nor is this a mere theory.

The Prologue to _Asolando_ supports it.
That sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died (1889), reveals his position towards Nature when he had lost the power of youth to pour fire on the world.

It is full of his last thinking.

"The poet's age is sad," he says.

"In youth his eye lent to everything in the natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of imagination: And now a flower is just a flower: Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man-- Simply themselves, uncinct by dower Of dyes which, when life's day began, Round each in glory ran." "Ah! what would you have ?" he says.