With Wordsworth, as with all great poets, his poetical creed passes into his religious. It is the same tune with variations. But we confess that, in his case, we do not think the variations equal. The mediation of Nature he understands, and has beautifully represented in his poetry; but that higher mediation of the Divine Man between man and the Father, does not lie fully or conspicuously on his page. A believer in the mystery of godliness he unquestionably was; but he seldom preached it. Christopher North, many years ago, in “Blackwood,” doubted if there were so much as a Bible in poor Margaret’s cottage (Excursion). We doubt so, too, and have not found much of the “true cross” among all his trees. The theologians divide prayer into four parts—adoration, thanksgiving, confession, and petition. Wordsworth stops at the second. No where do we find more solemn, sustained, habitual, and worthy adoration, than in his writings. The tone, too, of all his poems, is a calm thanksgiving, like that of a long blue, cloudless sky, coloring, at evening, into the hues of more fiery praise. But he does not weep like a penitent, nor supplicate like a child. Such feelings seem suppressed and folded up as far-off storms, and the traces of past tempests are succinctly inclosed in the algebra of the silent evening air. And hence, like Milton’s, his poetry has rather tended to foster the glow of devotion in the loftier spirits of the race—previously taught to adore—than like that of Cowper and Montgomery, to send prodigals back to their forsaken homes; Davids, to cry, “Against thee only have I sinned;” and Peters, to shriek in agony, “Lord, save us, we perish.”