The extract is taken from an ode which is titled Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. In this ode Wordsworth wants to sums up the relationship between babies and Nature in contrast with the relationship between adults and Nature. Wordsworth's conviction is that we come from God, we have our origin from God, and we bring with him. The child is sensitive to God's emotional memory and to all natural influences. The younger he is the better he perceives the emotional memory which makes everything bright and beautiful; as he grows up his emotional memory of God faint and fade, and he becomes incapable of perceiving God's memory. The poet has the ability to keep the emotional experience with god. In the Ode the speaking voice is remembering a past moment in his life when, being in a meadow, in a grove or in a stream, he could feel the spontaneous and immediate relation with Nature.
The poet is aware that he does not react as he used to do when he was a child and he regrets about his lost.