"Shall men for whom our age Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared, To explore the world without, and world within, Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious souls, Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh The planets in the hollow of their hand; And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains Have solved the elements, or analyzed The thinking principle;--shall they in fact Prove a degraded race? And what avails Renown, if their presumption makes them such? O! there is laughter at their work in heaven! Inquire of ancient wisdom; go, demand Of mighty nature, if 'twas ever meant That we should pray far off, yet be unraised; That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore. * * * * * That this magnificent effect of power, The earth we tread, the sky that we behold By day, and all the pomp which night reveals-- That these, and that superior mystery, Our vital frame, so fearfully devised, And the dread soul within it, should exist Only to be examined, pondered, searched, Probed, vexed, and criticised?--Accuse me not Of arrogance, unknown Wanderer as I am, If, having walked with nature three score years, And offered, far as frailty would allow, My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth, I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, Whom I have served, that their DIVINITY Revolts, offended at the ways of men, Swayed by such motives, to such ends employed."--Pp. 170-1. This divine principle, which can thus outsoar and put to shame the vanity and conceit of science, can also baffle and repulse all the sophistries of metaphysics. "Within the soul a faculty abides, That with interpositions which would hide And darken, so can deal, that they become Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt Her native brightness."--P. 174. There, too, Wordsworth and the Friends are entirely agreed, and yet further. This faculty exists in and operates for all; and whoever trusts in it shall, like the Friends, pursue their way careless of all the changes of fashions or opinions. "Access for you Is yet preserved to principles of truth, Which the imaginative Will upholds In seats of wisdom, not to be approached By the inferior faculty that molds, With her minute and speculative pains, Opinion, ever changing." He illustrates the operation of this inward and primeval faculty by the simile of the child listening to a shell, and hearing, as it were, the murmurs of its native sea. Such a shell, he says, is "The universe itself Unto the ear of faith;" and in this you have a sanctuary to retire to at will, where you will become victorious over every delusive power and principle. The Friends consider this the glory of our mortal state, and Wordsworth says,--