There is an illumination for the critics! For these thirty years have they been astounding themselves at the originality of Wordsworth's philosophy, and expounding it by all imaginable aids of metaphysics. We have heard endless lectures on the ideality, the psychological profundity, the abstract doctrines of the poet; his new views, his spiritual communion with and exposition of the mysteries of nature, and of the soul in harmony with nature, etc., etc. That is the simple solution; it is Quakerism in poetry, neither more nor less. The question is, how Wordsworth stumbled on this doctrine; a doctrine on which his great poetical reputation is, in fact, built. Possibly, like George Fox, he found it in his solitary wanderings, and cogitations; but more probably he drew it direct from his Journal itself. It is a curious, but a well known fact, that all that knot of young and enthusiastic writers at Bristol, and afterward at Stowey and Allfoxden, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, were deeply read and imbued with the old Quaker worthies. Probably they were made acquainted with them by their two Quaker friends Lovell and Lloyd. Coleridge was so impressed with their principles that, though he preached, he did it in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that, as he said, "he might not have a rag of the woman of Babylon on him." He imbibed and proclaimed all the Quaker hatred of slavery and war. He declares in his Biographia Literaria his admiration of Fox. "One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole huge volume, there could be found as much fullness of heart and intellect, as bursts forth in many a simple page of George Fox." Southey always cherished the idea of writing the life of George Fox, but never accomplished it. Charles Lamb, another visitor of Stowey, at the time of this youthful effervescence, has recorded his visit to a Friends' meeting, and says, that in it he soon began to ask himself far more questions than he could quickly answer. He declares Sewell's History of the Quakers worth all ecclesiastical history put together. Wordsworth was not only as deeply read in these books as any of them, but is still, to my knowledge, remarkably well acquainted with the history and opinions of Friends; he has immortalized the very spade of one of them, Thomas Wilkinson, and--_Ecce signum_--has perfected the development of this great poetical system.