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
That flesh can know is theirs-the consciousness
Of Whom they are, habitually infused

Through every image and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised.

From earth to heaven, from human to divine;
Hence endless occupation for the Soul,
Whether discursive or intuitive;

Hence cheerfulness for acts of daily life,
Emotions which best foresight need not fear,
Most worthy then of trust when most intense.
Hence, amid ills that vex, and wrongs that crush
Our hearts-if here the words of Holy Writ
May with fit reverence be applied-that peace
Which passeth understanding, that repose
In moral judgments which from this pure source
Must come, or will by man be sought in vain.

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
Under a growing weight of vulgar sense,
And substitute a universe of death,

For that which moves with light and life informed,
Actual, divine, and true.

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;
Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer,

By heaven inspired; that frees from chains the soul,
Lifted, in union with the purest, best,

Of earth-born passions, on the wings of praise
Bearing a tribute to the Almighty's Throne.

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
Its natal murmur; followed it to light

And open day; accompanied its course

Among the ways of Nature, for a time
Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed ;
Then given it greeting as it rose once more
In strength, reflecting from its placid breast
The works of man and face of human life;
And lastly, from its progress have we drawn
Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought
Of human Being, Eternity, and God.

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
A lasting inspiration, sanctified

By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which 'mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself

Of quality and fabric more divine.

And if with this

I mix more lowly matter; with the thing
Contemplated, describe the Mind and Man
Contemplating; and who, and what he was,

The transitory Being that beheld

This Vision; when and where, and how he lived ;-
Be not this labour useless. If such theme

May sort with highest objects, then-dread Power!
Whose gracious favour is the primal source
Of all illumination-may my Life

Express the image of a better time,

More wise desires, and simpler manners :-nurse
My Heart in genuine freedom :-all pure thoughts
Be with me ;-so shall thy unfailing love
Guide, and support, and cheer me to the end!"

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