‘His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.’ And he had more than others, ‘That blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on, Until the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.’ And therefore he has had a whole host of sacred imitators. Mr. Keble, for example, has translated him for women. He has himself told us that he owed to Wordsworth the tendency _ad sanctiora_, which is the mark of his own writings; and in fact he has but adapted the tone and habit of reverence, which his master applied to common objects and the course of the seasons, to sacred objects and the course of the ecclesiastical year,—diffusing a mist of sentiment and devotion altogether delicious to a gentle and timid devotee. Hartley Coleridge is another translator. He has applied to the sensuous beauties and seductive parts of external nature the same _cultus_ which Wordsworth applied to the bare and the abstract. It is— ‘That fair beauty which no eye can see, Of that sweet music which no ear can measure.’ It is, as it were, female beauty in wood and water; it is Rydal Water on a shining day; it is the gloss of the world with the knowledge that it is gloss: the sense of beauty, as in some women, with the feeling that yet it is hardly theirs:— ‘The vale of Tempe had in vain been fair, Green Ida never deemed the nurse of Jove, Each fabled stream, beneath its covert grove, Had idly murmured to the idle air; The shaggy wolf had kept his horrid lair In Delphi’s cell and old Trophonius’ cave, And the wild wailing of the Ionian wave Had never blended with the sweet despair Of Sappho’s death-song,—if the sight inspired Saw only what the visual organs show; If heaven-born phantasy no more required Than what within the sphere of sense may grow. The beauty to perceive of earthly things, The mounting soul must heavenward prune her wings. And he knew it himself: he has sketched the essence of his works:—