The speaker has lost the "dizzy rapture" he had as a young man, when nature was "all in all" to him. As his older self describes his younger self, he was once "haunted" by the sound of the waterfall. Mountains, woods, and rocks also held an intense, immediate, unmediated pleasure for him: they were, he says, "an appetite; a feeling and a love." He was once head-over-heels in love with nature.
However, the speaker says he does not regret how he has changed from his younger days, when he drank in nature's "aching joys." Now, quieter and older, he finds a spiritual repose intertwined with nature, a "sense sublime" of God's presence in this beautiful setting. Therefore, he is still in love in a quieter, more spiritual way with nature and with this particular place, where he likes to come to measure the changes in himself over time. He finds moral guidance in nature, writing that he finds
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
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