Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,
In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,
His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped
Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
By the deep radiance of the setting sun;
Or him have I descried in distant sky,
A solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! Like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man
Ennobled outwardly before my sight;
And thus my heart was early introduced
To an unconscious love and reverence
Of human nature; hence the human form
To me became an index of delight,
Of grace and honour, power and worthiness.

"This sanctity of Nature given to man,"--this interfusion of human
interest with the sublimity of moor and hill,--formed a typical
introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded mankind to
the end,--depicting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal
influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little thing;
as when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the fields and
cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape with the space
and serenity of heaven.

To this distant perception of man--of man "purified, removed, and to
a distance that was fit"--was added, in his first summer vacation, a
somewhat closer interest in the small joys and sorrows of the