“And sate among the woods Alone upon some jutting eminence, At the first gleam of dawnlight, when the vale, Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude. How shall I seek the origin? where find Faith in the marvelous things which then I felt? Oft in these moments such a holy calm Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw Appeared like something in myself, a dream, A prospect in the mind.” These were his supreme moments of existence, when the vision first dawned upon his soul, when without knowing it he was baptized with an effluence from on high, consecrated to be the poet-priest of Nature’s mysteries. The light that then came to him was in after years “the master-light of all his seeing,” the fountain-head of his highest inspirations. From this was drawn that peculiar ethereal gleam which rests on his finest after productions—the ode to the Cuckoo, the poems on Matthew, Tintern Abbey, the Intimations of Immortality, and many another poem. Not that he knew in these accesses of soul what he was receiving. He felt them at the time, and passed on. Only long afterwards, when “The eagerness of infantine desire” was over, in hours of tranquil thought, the remembrance of those bright moments recurred, with a sense of distance from his present self so remote, that “Often did he seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of himself, And of some other being.” The Prelude contains nothing more beautiful Of instructive than the whole account of that Hawkshead school-time. It portrays the wonderful boyhood of a wonderful boy, though neither he himself nor others then thought him the least wonderful. Reflecting on it long afterwards, Wordsworth saw, and every student of his poetry will see, that in that time lay the secret of his power, by the impulses then received his whole philosophy of life and of poetry was determined. Natural objects, he tells us, then came home to him primarily through the human affections and associations of which they are the outward framework,—just as the infant when he first comes to know sensible objects, learns to associate them with the interventions of the touch, the look, the tenderness of its mother. Gradually, even before school-time was past, Nature had come to have a meaning and an attraction for him, by herself, without the need of such intervening agents. Further, he tells us, that while for him at that time each individual rock, tree, and flower, had an interest of its own, he came deeply to feel the great living whole which Nature is. All his thoughts, he says, were steeped in feeling.