convention, attention was redirected to the phenomena of Nature by
Collins, Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, it was
in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of an intimate
worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in Thomson, we have mere
picturesqueness,--a reproduction of Nature for the mere pleasure of
reproducing her,--a kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects. Or
sometimes, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which looks on
Nature with a side glance, and uses her as an accessory to the
expression of human love and woe. Cowper sometimes contemplated her
as a whole, but only as affording a proof of the wisdom and goodness
of a personal Creator.

To express what is characteristic in Wordsworth we must recur to a
more generalized conception of the relations between the natural and
the spiritual worlds. We must say with Plato--the lawgiver of all
subsequent idealists--that the unknown realities around us, which
the philosopher apprehends by the contemplation of abstract truth,
become in various ways obscurely perceptible to men under the
influence of a "divine madness,"--of an enthusiasm which is in fact
inspiration. And further, giving, as he so often does, a
half-fanciful expression to a substance of deep meaning,--Plato
distinguishes four kinds of this enthusiasm. There is the prophet's
glow of revelation; and the prevailing prayer which averts the wrath
of heaven; and that philosophy which enters, so to say, unawares
into the poet through his art, and into the lover through his love.
Each of these stimuli may so exalt the inward faculties as to make a
man [Greek: entheos kyi ekphron],--"bereft of reason but filled
with divinity,"--percipient of an intelligence other and larger than
his own. To this list Wordsworth has made an important addition. He
has shown by his example and writings that the contemplation of