My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought, As if life's business were a summer mood: As if all needful things would come unsought To genial faith still rich in genial good. When his faith is tried by harsh experience, the leech-gatherer comes, Like a man from some far region sent To give me human strength by apt admonishment; for he shows how the 'genial faith' may be converted into permanent strength by resolution and independence. The verses most commonly quoted, such as-- We poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and sadness, give the ordinary view of the sickly school. Wordsworth's aim is to supply an answer worthy not only of a poet, but a man. The same sentiment again is expressed in the grand 'Ode to Duty,' where the Stern daughter of the voice of God is invoked to supply that 'genial sense of youth' which has hitherto been a sufficient guidance; or in the majestic morality of the 'Happy Warrior;' or in the noble verses on 'Tintern Abbey;' or, finally, in the great ode which gives most completely the whole theory of that process by which our early intuitions are to be transformed into settled principles of feeling and action. Wordsworth's philosophical theory, in short, depends upon the asserted identity between our childish instincts and our enlightened reason. The doctrine of a state of pre-existence, as it appears in other writers--as, for example, in the Cambridge Platonists[25]--was connected with an obsolete metaphysical system, and the doctrine--exploded in its old form--of innate ideas. Wordsworth does not attribute any such preternatural character to the 'blank misgivings' and 'shadowy recollections' of which he speaks. They are invaluable data of our spiritual experience; but they do not entitle us to lay down dogmatic propositions independently of experience. They are spontaneous products of a nature in harmony with the universe in which it is placed, and inestimable as a clear indication that such a harmony exists. To interpret and regulate them belongs to the reasoning faculty and the higher imagination of later years. If he does not quite distinguish between the province of reason and emotion--the most difficult of philosophical problems--he keeps clear of the cruder mysticism, because he does not seek to elicit any definite formulæ from those admittedly vague forebodings which lie on the border-land between the two sides of our nature. With his invariable sanity of mind, he more than once notices the difficulty of distinguishing between that which nature teaches us and the interpretations which we impose upon nature.[26] He carefully refrains from pressing the inference too far.