perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of
life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
and happier as I came under their influence."

Words like these, proceeding from a mind so different from the
poet's own, form perhaps as satisfactory a testimony to the value of
his work as any writer can obtain. For they imply that Wordsworth
has succeeded in giving his own impress to emotions which may become
common to all; that he has produced a body of thought which is felt
to be both distinctive and coherent, while yet it enlarges the
reader's capacities instead of making demands upon his credence.
Whether there be theories, they shall pass; whether there be systems,
they shall fail; the true epoch-maker in the history of the human
soul is the man who educes from this bewildering universe a new and
elevating joy.

I have alluded above to some of the passages, most of them familiar
enough, in which Wordsworth's sense of the mystic relation between
the world without us and the world within--the correspondence
between the seen and the unseen--is expressed in its most general
terms. But it is evident that such a conviction as this, if it
contain any truth, cannot be barren of consequences on any level of
thought. The communion with Nature which is capable of being at
times sublimed to an incommunicable ecstasy must be capable also of
explaining Nature to us so far as she can be explained; there must
be _axiomata media_ of natural religion; there must be something in
the nature of poetic truths, standing midway between mystic
intuition and delicate observation.

How rich Wordsworth is in these poetic truths--how illumining is the