either, a world which is, as it were, the child of these two parents, but a child greater than either of its parents. And the result of having attained this higher region is a noble moral life, a life of liberty and blessedness. Such minds are truly from the Deity, For they are Powers: and hence the highest bliss Through every image and through every thought, From earth to heaven, from human to divine; Hence cheerfulness for acts of daily life, Book xiv. But the result is not only a noble moral life, but also a deep religious one. Wordsworth brings out this by returning a little on his past, and asking in reference to the passage just quoted, whether he has in his own life gained this moral freedom. It is a humbler destiny, he answers, that he has pictured. He has had his visitations. in the solemn temples of the mountains, from careless youth to conscious manhood; he has been a suffering man and suffered with mankind, but he has never tampered with conscience, never yielded in any public hope to selfish passions, never been enslaved by worldliness, never allowed the tendency Of use and custom to bow down the soul For that which moves with light and life informed, It was fear and love that had done this-and here he is referring to his boyish time-but only love at last, in which fear was drowned; love by which "subsists all lasting grandeur, without which we are dust;" love such as in early spring all things feel for one another; love such as the lover feels for her who is "his choice of all the world;" love which soars beyond all earthly love, but which contains it, the spiritual love that adoring finds its end in God. Here, where the medieval Platonists ended, Wordsworth ends. The life he had found in his own mind, the life he has found in the outward universe, mingling, together "in love and holy passion," have led him finally to the source of the life of both in God. The delight of earthly passion is pitiable : Unless this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe; By heaven inspired; that frees from chains the soul, Of earth-born passions, on the wings of praise And then he resumes the whole of this history of his mind. The organ of this spiritual Love is Imagination, and it has been the "feeding source" of his long labour : We have traced the stream From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard And open day; accompanied its course Among the ways of Nature, for a time And he who has reached this point, and has the expressing power of the Poet, is to be the prophet of Nature and of men, to tell them of the Manhood that is greater than Nature ;-and the revealer in his own life through the power of God whom he adores within him, of a more beautiful and unworldly time, of a world where the heart of Man may become more free and full of purer thought. This is the duty of the Poet-this ought to be the Poet's life. Two passages contain it, one at the end of the Prelude; the other at the end of the Preface to the Excursion. I throw them both together, and close my lecture with them :: Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Of quality and fabric more divine. And if with this I mix more lowly matter; with the thing The transitory Being that beheld This Vision; when and where, and how he lived ;- May sort with highest objects, then-dread Power! Express the image of a better time, More wise desires, and simpler manners :-nurse LECTURE XIII. Ir was natural to Wordsworth, self-removed, as he was, from the crowd of men and from the more everyday interests of the world, that much of his religion should cluster round two things; one of which was the larger interests and vocation of the whole of mankind, and the ideas which push forward or backward the growth of Man; and the other, the interests and affections and duties that belong to the natural relations of parents and children, brothers and sisters, friend and friend, wife and husband. The former I have already treated of, showing how this secluded man threw himself with ardour into the general struggle of Man for liberty and right, and even in his later conservatism, preserved his vivid interest in human doings. The latter, however, I did not touch on, and my subject this afternoon is the religious thoughts which Wordsworth collected round the days and life of childhood, and, in connexion with this, his view of Immortality. And first, whatever may have been his stated creed, he laid aside as Poet the severer doctrine of Original Sin, which stains the child with evil from its birth, and brings it into the world as the child of the devil. He compares |