The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

 Proteus  was an early sea god referenced by  Homer  as “The Old Man of the Sea.” 
 He can be forced to read the future by anyone who is able to hold him whilst he takes on many frightening forms, as seen in  The Odyssey . 
 The line points to a strange tension between poetry and imagination. Does Wordsworth really believe that if he were a pagan he would actually be able to see Proteus rising from the see? More realistically, mythology provides imaginative resources, ideas and images for reckoning with inhuman powers–resources that Wordsworth, in a large sense, still has: the poetry enacts mythologized vision. 
 So maybe Wordsworth can “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea” in his imagination. What he regrets, then, is that he can’t endorse his imagination as truth. Thanks to intellectual developments since the time of the Greeks, imagination is severed from the “world,” and Wordsworth is upset about that.
The world is too much with us...