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 opening-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.