Quincey,--I do not say with admiration, but with this exceptional
sense of revelation and awe?

The explanation of this anomaly lies, as is well known, in something
new and individual in the way in which Wordsworth regarded Nature;
something more or less discernible in most of his works, and
redeeming even some of the slightest of them from insignificance,
while conferring on the more serious and sustained pieces an
importance of a different order from that which attaches to even the
most brilliant productions of his contemporaries. To define with
exactness, however, what was this new element imported by our poet
into man's view of Nature is far from easy, and requires some brief
consideration of the attitude in this respect of his predecessors.

There is so much in the external world which is terrible or
unfriendly to man, that the first impression made on him by Nature
as a whole, even in temperate climates, is usually that of awfulness;
his admiration being reserved for the fragments of her which he has
utilized for his own purposes, or adorned with his own handiwork.
When Homer tells us of a place

Where even a god might gaze, and stand apart,
And feel a wondering rapture at the heart,

it is of no prospect of sea or mountain that he is speaking, but of
a garden where everything is planted in rows, and there is a
never-ending succession of pears and figs. These gentler aspects of
Nature will have their minor deities to represent them; but the men,
of whatever race they be, whose minds are most absorbed in the
problems of man's position and destiny will tend for the most part