Excerpt from Walden
Henry David Thoreau
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.

One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had no yet fairly come out of the torpid state.

What does the word "torpid" mean as used in this passage?
A) lazy or slow to move
B) indolent or inactive
C) sluggish or apathetic
D) dormant; as in hibernating

it would most likely be b. your welcome.

d. pushing his plate away from the edge of the table idk what the other guy was trying to

wordsworth tends to see nature as 'out there'; a presence which surrounds humans, and contributes to human life, but is different from humans. if you look at a typical wordsworth poem (there was a boy, ye knew him well ye rocks) - wordsworth talks about nature as something that needs to be learned about and understood, nature is different from us.  

if you look at a byron poem (the isles of greece is a good one) - byron looks at nature mainly for what it already means to man. wordsworth will look at a landscape and see the mountains, trees, valleys, and rivers as almost spiritual presences - wordsworth wants to get to know nature.  

byron will look at the same landscape and he will want to know who lives there, what are the villages? are there any farms or mines, is there some history?  

wordsworth looks at nature for what it is; byron is forever asking what it means.  

wordsworth thinks that humans are part of nature; byron thinks that nature is part of being human