ned experience, but of timidity, or at least as the
sign of decreasing insight. It is not so that I would interpret it.
Wordsworth and his sister, with their rare gift of soul and eye, saw
further into nature, and felt it more profoundly than common men can, and
had no doubt found there something which the gross world dreams not of.
They recovered thence a higher teaching, which men for ages had lost.
They learnt to think of God as being actually very near to them in all
they saw and heard; not as the mechanical Artificer, who makes a world
and then dwells aloof from it, but as

'The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves.'

In nature, which to most eyes is but a dull lifeless mass, impelled by
dead mechanic movements, their finer spirits were aware of a breathing
life, a living Presence, distinct, yet not alien from, their own spirits,
and thence they drank life, and strength, and joy. And not in nature
alone, but from their own hearts, from the deep places of their moral
nature, and from their minglings with their fellow-men, they could
oftentimes overhear

'The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.'

And through this they learned to feel for themselves, and not
conventionally, the upholding presence of One on whom the soul's 'dark
foundations rest.' Likely enough, in the prime of their strength they
may have imagined that these teachings coming from nature and from man
were in themselves enough.

But when sorrow and bereavement came, and with them the deepened sense of
sin and of utter need, they learned that in nature alone was nothing
which in the end they could abide by. They had been true to the lights
they had, and they were led on to higher. They were led to go beyond
nature and man for their ultimate support, and to overhear from that
higher region another, diviner 'tone, into which all the strains of this
world's music are ultimately to be resolved.' The Poet, nor less his
sister, came at length to feel, what philosophers find so hard to
believe,--that The Being whom he had long known as near him in the
solitudes of nature, as close to the beatings of his own heart, was He
who had so loved him as to die for him. True it is that this later and
more distinctly Christian experience is but faintly reflected in
Wordsworth's poetry compared with the earlier naturalistic mood. But