William James is the focus of this chapter due to the pivotal influence in fields of literary discourse and philosophy of his survival of depression through recourse to engagement with more fluid notions of thinking. His turn to the oceanic and the fluid came through his vicarious experience of the discourse of the sanative properties of nature through his reading of Wordsworth’s long poem The Excursion. The chapter offers a close reading of the latter to contextualize its impact on James’s move towards pragmatic modes of thinking and his survival of the worst periods of his mental ill-health.