In this state he regards man as restored to the original privilege of his nature, and admitted to communion with the spirit of the Creator, and into contact with all knowledge. "He sees into the life of things." So duly did Fox consider that he saw into the life of things, that he believed that the knowledge of the quality of all plants, minerals, and physical substances was imparted to him, and that had he not had a still higher vocation assigned him, as a discerner and comforter of spirits, he could have practiced most successfully as a physician. He believed and taught, and Barclay, his great disciple, in his famous Apology, teaches the same thing, that in this state of communion with the Spirit of all knowledge, a man needs no interpreter of the Scriptures; that without any knowledge of the original languages, he can instinctively tell where they are erroneously rendered, and what is the true meaning. He has penetrated to the fountain of truth, and not only of truth, but, to use Wordsworth's words again, of "the deep power of joy." He is raised above all earthly evil and anxiety, and breathes in the invisible presence, the pure air of heaven. He is in a kind restored to the unity of his nature, of power, intelligence, and felicity. How exactly is this the language of our poet! "I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows, and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half create, And what perceive: well pleased to recognize, In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being."--Vol. ii. pp. 183, 184. But this great Quaker doctrine is not the casual doctrine of one or two casual or isolated poems; it is the foundation and fabric of the whole. It is the great theme everywhere pursued. Of his principal and noblest production, The Excursion, it is the brain, the very backbone, the vitals, and the moving sinews. Take away that, and you take all. Take that, and you reduce the poet to a level with a hundred others. His hero, the wanderer, is a shepherd boy grown into a pedler, or pack-merchant, who has been educated and baptized into this sublime knowledge of God speaking through nature. In his sixth year he tended cattle on the hills.