Vision, Revelation, Ecstasy,--it is not only while these are
kindling our way that we should speak of them to men, but rather
when they have passed from us and left us only their record in our
souls, whose permanence confirms the fiery finger which wrote it
long ago. For as the Greeks would end the first drama of a trilogy
with a hush of concentration, and with declining notes of calm, so
to us the narrowing receptivity and persistent steadfastness of age
suggest not only decay but expectancy, and not death so much as sleep;
or seem, as it were, the beginning of operations which are not
measured by our hurrying time, nor tested by any achievement to be
accomplished here.




CHAPTER X.


NATURAL RELIGION.

It will have been obvious from the preceding pages, as well as from
the tone of other criticisms on Wordsworth, that his exponents are
not content to treat his poems on Nature simply as graceful
descriptive pieces, but speak of him in terms usually reserved for
the originators of some great religious movement. "The very image of
Wordsworth," says De Quincey, for instance, "as I prefigured it to
my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St.
Paul." How was it that poems so simple in outward form that the
reviewers of the day classed them with the _Song of Sixpence_, or at
best with the _Babes in the Wood_, could affect a critic like De