few would regard
as reprehensible. These natural instincts, this force and energy, good
in themselves, Wordsworth did not crush, but deliberately turned into a
higher channel.

At the end of the _Prelude_ he makes his confession of the sins he did
not commit.

Never did I, in quest of right and wrong,
Tamper with conscience from a private aim;
Nor was in any public hope the dupe
Of selfish passions; nor did ever yield
Wilfully to mean cares or low pursuits.

Such a confession, or rather boast, in the mouth of almost any other man
would sound hypocritical or self-complacent; but with Wordsworth, we
feel it is the bare truth told us for our help and guidance, as being
the necessary and preliminary step. It is a high standard which is held
up before us, even in this first stage, for it includes, not merely the
avoidance of all obvious sins against man and society, but a tuning-up,
a transmuting of the whole nature to high and noble endeavour.
Wordsworth found his reward, in a settled state of calm serenity,
"consummate happiness," "wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative,"
and, as he tells us in the fourth book of the _Prelude_, on one evening
during that summer vacation,

Gently did my soul
Put off her veil, and, self-transmuted, stood
Naked, as in the presence of her God.

When the mind and soul have been prepared, the next step is
concentration, aspiration. Then it is borne in upon the poet that in the
infinite and in the eternal alone can we find rest, can we find
ourselves; and towards this infinitude we must strive with unflagging
ardour;

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there.

_Prelude_, Book vi. 604.

The result of this aspiration towards the infinite is a quickening of
consciousness, upon which follows the attainment of the third or unitive
stage, the moment when man can "breathe in worlds to which the heaven of
heavens is but a veil," and perceive "the forms whose kingdom is where
time and place are not." Such minds--

need not extraordinary calls
To rouse them; in a world of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
... the highest bliss
That flesh can know _is theirs_--the consciousness
Of Whom they are.

_Prelude_, Book xiv. 105, 113,

Wordsworth possessed in a peculiar degree a mystic sense of infinity,
of the boundless, of the openin