hing out from him in being, to rush instantly
back to him in service and praise. Again the natal dew of the first
morning is seen lying on bud and blade, and the low voice of the first
evening's song becomes audible again. Although Coleridge in his youth was
a Spinozist, Wordsworth seems at once, and forever, to have recoiled from
even his friend's eloquent version of that creedless creed, that baseless
foundation, that system, through the _phenomenon_ of which look not the
bright eyes of Supreme Intelligence, but the blind face of irresponsible
and infinite necessity. Shelley himself--with all the power his critics
attribute to him of painting night, animating Atheism, and giving strange
loveliness to annihilation--has failed in redeeming Spinoza's theory from
the reproach of being as hateful as it is false; and there is no axiom we
hold more strongly than this--that the theory which can not be rendered
poetical, can not be true. "Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty," said
poor Keats, to whom time, however, was not granted to come down from the
first glowing generalization of his heart, to the particular creeds which
his ripened intellect would have, according to _it_, rejected or received.

Nor, although Wordsworth is a devoted lover of Nature, down to what many
consider the very blots--or, at least, dashes and commas in her page, is he
blind to the fact of her transient character. The power he worships has
his "dwelling in the light of setting suns," but that dwelling is not his
everlasting abode. For earth, and the universe, a "_milder day_" (words
certifying their truth by their simple beauty) is in store when "the
monuments" of human weakness, folly, and evil, shall "all be over-grown."
He sees afar off the great spectacle of Nature retiring before God; the
embassador giving place to the King; the bright toys of this nursery--sun,
moon, earth, and stars--put away, like childish things; the symbols of the
Infinite lost in the Infinite itself; and though he could, on the Saturday
evening, bow before the midnight mountains, and midnight heavens, he could
also, on the Sabbath morn, in Rydal church, bow as profoundly before the
apostolic word, "All these things shall be dissolved."

With Wordsworth, as with all great poets, his poetical creed passes into
his religious. It is the same tune with variations. But we confess that,
in his case, we do not think the variations equal. The mediation of Nature
he understands, and