g-out of the world of our normal finite
experience into the transcendental; and he had a rare power of putting
this into words. It was a feeling which, as he tells us in the _Prelude_
(Book xiii.), he had from earliest childhood, when the disappearing line
of the public highway--

Was like an invitation into space
Boundless, or guide into eternity,

a feeling which, applied to man, gives that inspiriting certitude of
boundless growth, when the soul has--

... an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire.

It is at this point, and on this subject, that Wordsworth's poetical and
ethical imagination are most nearly fused. This fusion is far from
constant with him; and the result is that there are tracts of his
writings where the sentiments are excellent, the philosophy
illuminating, but the poetry is not great: it does not awaken the
"transcendental feeling."[22] The moments when this condition is most
fully attained by Wordsworth occur when, by sheer force of poetic
imagination combined with spiritual insight, in some mysterious and
indescribable way, he flashes upon us a sensation of boundless infinity.
Herein consists the peculiar magic of such a poem as _Stepping
Westward_; and there is a touch of the same feeling in the _Solitary
Reaper_.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on other mystical elements in
Wordsworth, such as his belief in the one law governing all things,
"from creeping plant to sovereign man," and the hint of belief in
pre-existence in the _Ode on Immortality_. His attitude towards life as
a whole is to be found in a few lines in the "after-thought" to the
Duddon sonnets.

The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish:--be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.

Richard Jefferies is closely akin to Wordsworth in his overpowering
consciousness of the life in nature. This consciousness is the strongest
force in him, so that at times he is almost submerged by it, and he
loses the sense of outward things. In this condition of trance the sense
of time vanishes, there is, he asserts, no such thi