to heaven. The heavens and
the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental
economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the
former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those
frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God's glory
seems to shine with a struggle, and but faintly, shall disappear--nay, the
worlds which bore, and sheltered them in their rugged dens and eaves,
shall flee from the face of the regenerator. "A milder day" is to dawn on
the universe--the refinement of matter is to keep pace with the elevation
of mind. Evil and sin are to be eternally banished to some Siberia of
space. The word of the poet is to be fulfilled,

"And one eternal spring encircles all!"

The mediatorial purpose of creation, fully subserved, is to be abandoned,
that we may see "eye to eye," and that God may be "all in all."

That such views of matter--its present ministry--the source of its beauty
and glory--and its future destiny, transferred from the pages of both
Testaments to those of our great moral and religious poets, have deepened
some of their profoundest, and swelled some of their highest strains, is
unquestionable. Such prospects as were in Milton's eye, when he sung,

"Thy Saviour and thy Lord
Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed,
In glory of the Father to dissolve
Satan with his perverted world; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,"

may be found in Thomson, in his closing Hymn to the Seasons, in
Coleridge's "Religious Musings," (in Shelley's "Prometheus" even, but
perverted and disguised), in Bailey's "Festus" (cumbered and entangled
with his religious theory); and more rootedly, although less
theologically, than in all the rest, in the poetry of Wordsworth.

The secret of Wordsworth's profound and peculiar love for Nature, even in
her meaner and minuter forms, may lie, perhaps, here. De Quincey seeks for
it in a peculiar conformation of the eye, as if he actually did see more
in the object than other men--in the rose a richer red, in the sky a deeper
azure, in the broom a yellower gold, in the sun a more dazzling ray, in
the sea a finer foam, and in the star a more sparkling splendor, than even
Nature's own "sweet and cunning" hand put on; but the critic has not
sought to explain the rationale of this peculiari