William Wordsworth and Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of the power of memory and the ways in which memory of love and memory of natural beauty can become entwined with one another. But their renditions of this common theme are dramatically different from each other, the result both of the differences in dominant literary styles of the times when they were writing as well as their own differences in temperament and philosophy.
William Wordsworth is often considered to be the greatest poet of the Romantic era, and his "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798" - almost always called simply "Tintern Abbey" for rather obvious reasons - is considered to be one of the pinnacles of Romantic poetry. In this poem, Wordsworth makes a compelling argument that in the presence of nature and of natural beauty each individual becomes refreshed, revivified, and sanctified: It was the chief tenet of the Romantic era that the evils that civilization burned into human nature could be eased away by nature. Nature, for Wordsworth, restored to each human soul something of the original state of innocence. All of nature, including this ruin set against the beauty of the flowing Wye, was a little piece of Eden. He describes his coming once again upon this place that he has encountered once and whose beauties he has carried with him:
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration (http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html)
Nature must always be to Wordsworth the source of both tranquility and truth, the place where people must go to be as near both the div...