When the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world;--

unless his tone awakes a responsive conviction in ourselves, there
is no argument by which he can prove to us that he is offering a new
insight to mankind. Yet, on the other hand, it need not be
unreasonable to see in his message something more than a mere
individual fancy. It seems, at least, to be closely correlated with
those other messages of which we have spoken,--those other cases
where some original element of our nature is capable of being
regarded as an inlet of mystic truth. For in each of these complex
aspects of religion we see, perhaps, the modification of a primeval
instinct. There is a point of view from which Revelation seems to be
but transfigured Sorcery, and Love transfigured Appetite, and
Philosophy man's ordered Wonder, and Prayer his softening Fear. And
similarly in the natural religion of Wordsworth we may discern the
modified outcome of other human impulses hardly less universal--of
those instincts which led our forefathers to people earth and air
with deities, or to vivify the whole universe with a single soul. In
this view the achievement of Wordsworth was of a kind which most of
the moral leaders of the race have in some way or other performed.
It was that he turned a theology back again into a religion: that he
revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of
reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into
speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of
beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,--
of rites which had become unmeaning,--he substituted an admiration
for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a
sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable worship. Such