The secret of Wordsworth’s profound and peculiar love for Nature, even in her meaner and minuter forms, may lie, perhaps, here. De Quincey seeks for it in a peculiar conformation of the eye, as if he actually did see more in the object than other men—in the rose a richer red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the broom a yellower gold, in the sun a more dazzling ray, in the sea a finer foam, and in the star a more sparkling splendor, than even Nature’s own “sweet and cunning” hand put on; but the critic has not sought to explain the rationale of this peculiarity. Mere acuteness of vision it can not have been, else the eagle might have _felt_, though not written, “The Excursion”—else the fact is not accountable why many of weak sight, such as Burke, have been rapturous admirers of Nature; and so, till we learn that Mr. De Quincey has looked through Wordsworth’s eyes, we must call this a mere fancy. Hazlitt again, and others since, have accounted for the phenomenon by association—but this fails, we suspect, fully to explain the deep, native, and brooding passion in question—a passion which, instead of being swelled by the associations of after life, rose to lull stature in youth, as “Tintern Abbey” testifies. One word of his own, perhaps, better solves the mystery—it is the one word “consecration”— “The _consecration_ and the poet’s dream.” His eye had been anointed with eye-salve, and he saw, as his poet-predecessors had done, the temple in which he was standing, heard in every breeze and ocean billow the sound of a temple-service, and felt that the grandeur of the ritual, and of its recipient, threw the shadow of their greatness upon every stone in the corners of the edifice, and upon every eft crawling along its floors. Reversing the miracle, he saw “trees as men walking”—heard the speechless sins, and, in the beautiful thought of “the Roman,” caught on his ear the fragments of a “divine soliloquy,” filling up the pauses in a universal anthem. Hence the tumultuous, yet awful joy of his youthful feelings to Nature. Hence his estimation of its lowliest features; for does not every bush and tree appear to him a “pillar in the temple of his God?” The leaping fish pleases him, because its “cheer” in the lonely tarn is of praise. The dropping of the earth on the coffin lid, is a slow and solemn psalm, mingling in austere sympathy with the raven’s croak, and in his “Power of sound” he proceeds elaborately to condense all those varied voices, high or low, soft or harsh, united or discordant, into one crushing chorus, like the choruses of Haydn, or of heaven. Nature undergoes no outward change to his _eye_, but undergoes a far deeper transfiguration to his spirit—as she stands up in the white robes, and with the sounding psalmodies of her mediatorial office, between him and the Infinite I AM.