The weary sun betook himself to rest; Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west, _Outshining like a visible God_ _The glorious path in which he trod._ Again, observe how the imagination kindles and melts into rapturous idealization, and impetuously deifies the object of its sentiment, in the following short reference to the death of Coleridge: Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign, its steadfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvelous source; _The ’rapt One of the godlike forehead,_ _The heaven-eyed creature._ In the sonnet which we now extract we have a specimen of that still ecstasy, so calm and so intense, in which Wordsworth stands almost alone among modern poets: A fairer face of evening cannot be; The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the sea: Listen! the mighty being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear’st untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year; And worship’st at the temple’s inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not. It is, however, in the sublime “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood,” that we best perceive the power of Wordsworth’s imagination in all the various modes of its expression—descriptive, analytic, meditative, interpretative, abstract and ecstatic; and in this ode each of these modes helps the other; the grand choral harmonies of the rapturous upward movement seeming to be born out of the intense contemplation, that hovers dizzily over the outmost bounds of human conception, to scrutinize, in the dim dawn of consciousness, —those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing. It is from these that we have ecstasy almost as a logical conclusion; for _Hence_ in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, _Our souls have sight of that immortal sea_ _Which brought us hither,_ _Can in a moment travel thither,_ _And see the children sport upon the shore,_ _And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore._