‘Early had he learned To reverence the volume that displays The mystery, the life which cannot die; But in the mountains did he _feel_ his faith. All things responsive to the writing, there Breathed immortality, revolving life, And greatness still revolving; infinite; There littleness was not. ... —In the after-day Of boyhood, many an hour in caves forlorn, And ’mid the hollow depths of naked crags, He sate, and e’en in their fixed lineaments Or from the power of a peculiar eye, Or by creative feeling overborne, Or by predominance of thought oppressed, E’en in their fixed and steady lineaments He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind, Expression ever varying! ... 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.’ The defect of this religion is, that it is too abstract for the practical, and too bare for the musing. The worship of sensuous beauty—the southern religion—is of all sentiments the one most deficient in his writings. His poetry hardly even gives the charm, the entire charm, of the scenery in which he lived. The lighter parts are little noticed: the rugged parts protrude. The bare waste, the folding hill, the rough lake, Helvellyn with a brooding mist, Ulswater in a grey day: these are his subjects. He took a personal interest in the corners of the universe. There is a print of Rembrandt said to represent a piece of the Campagna, a mere waste, with a stump and a man, and under is written ‘Tacet et loquitur;’ and thousands will pass the old print-shop where it hangs, and yet have a taste for paintings, and colours, and oils: but some fanciful students, some lonely stragglers, some long-haired enthusiasts, by chance will come, one by one, and look, and look, and be hardly able to take their eyes from the fascination, so massive is the shade, so still the conception, so firm the execution. Thus is it with Wordsworth and his poetry. _Tacet et loquitur._ Fashion apart, the million won’t read it. Why should they?—they could not understand it. Don’t put them out,—let them buy, and sell, and die;—but idle students, and enthusiastic wanderers, and solitary thinkers, will read, and read, and read, while their lives and their occupations hold. In truth, his works are the Scriptures of the intellectual life; for that same searching, and finding, and penetrating power which the real Scripture exercises on those engaged, as are the mass of men, in practical occupations and domestic ties, do his works exercise on the meditative, the solitary, and the young.