Summary
The speaker explains that he suddenly feels as happy as he would if he was really out walking with his friends. As a matter of fact, he says, even in the lime-tree bower he's discovered some delightful things: the leaves under the bright sun, and their shadows on the ground, the walnut tree, and the colorful ivy hiding elm trees. As the twilight begins, he appreciates the sight of branches against the darkening sky. He sees a bat fly overhead, and notes that birds have gone silent—but a bee still buzzes nearby.
Analysis
Before taking a close look at this section of the poem, let's revisit the path we've taken so far. At the beginning of the poem, our speaker was consumed by his own sadness. He started to imagine where his friends had gone, but was too upset to truly empathize with them. However, his imagination slowly freed him from his own experience and allowed him to deeply feel for his friend Charles. Eventually, that empathy became so intense that he could extend it beyond Charles. He empathized with and spoke to every part of nature, feeling a kinship with all of it and completely departing from his own solitary experience. Now, in this final stanza, we return to the speaker's real, non-imaginative life. He stops thinking so much about his friends and instead dwells on his own experiences again. But now, rather than feeling trapped and miserable, he's happy and appreciative.
Before, the speaker barely seemed to notice his own surroundings, so busy was he focusing on where he'd prefer to be instead. He simply compared the bower where he sat to a prison, neglecting to comment on what it looked or sounded or smelled like, and moved on. Here, he notices the tiniest elements of his surroundings. They're not as majestic as the waterfalls and hillsides his friends are seeing, but he describes them in the same awestruck, loving detail, and attributes agency and activity to them. He uses striking verbs that personify the natural world around him: the ivy "usurps" the elms, the bat "wheels" by. Just as he earlier talked about the dell as a lively, action-packed place, here he does the same with his own humble bower. Moreover, animals are mentioned here for the first time in the poem. Not only does he feel less alone because he sees life and agency in the plants and sun—he's also literally not alone, he realizes, because he's surrounded by bats and bees.
It seems as if the speaker, by imagining his friends' happiness, has actually managed to make himself happier as well. This is a mirror image of a process we saw earlier in the poem, when the speaker's own feelings of being trapped made him empathize with Charles's feelings of being trapped in the city. This emotional mirroring is reflected in a syntactical mirroring. The speaker, explaining that his vicarious happiness has actually made him appreciate the bower, waxes "Nor in this bower/This little lime-tree bower,/have I not mark'd/Much that has sooth'd be." This is a wildly complex way of saying that he has, in his bower, found some things that soothe his bad mood. It uses a double negative, turning the sentence into a hall of mirrors. After all, the speaker's entire experience is something of a hall of mirrors. His feelings and experiences are reflected and refracted through his friends' and vice-versa.
