What then was the spiritual nutriment he had gathered from that boyhood passed in Nature’s immediate presence? He had felt, and after reflection had made the feelings a rooted and habitual conviction, that the world without him, the thing we call Nature, is not a dead machine, but something all pervaded by a life—sometimes he calls it a soul; that this living Nature was a unity; that there was that in it which awoke in him feelings of calmness, awe, and tenderness; that this infinite life in Nature was not something which he attributed to Nature, but that it existed external to him, independent of his thoughts and feelings, and was in no way the creation of his own mind; that, though his faculties in nowise created those qualities in Nature, they might go forth and aspire towards them, and find support in them; that even when he was withdrawn from the presence of that Nature and these qualities, yet that they subsist quite independent of his perceptions of them. And the conviction that Nature there was living on all the same, whether he heeded her or not, imparted to his mind kindred calm and coolness, and fed it with thoughts of majesty. This, or something like it, is the conviction which he tries to express in “The Prelude.” Those vague emotions, those visionary gleams which came to him in the happier moments of boyhood, before which the solid earth was all unsubstantialized and transfigured—these he held to be, though he could not prove it, intimations coming to his soul direct from God. In one of these moments, a glorious summer morning, when he was spending a Cambridge vacation by the Lakes, he for the first time consciously felt himself to be a dedicated spirit, consecrated to truth and purity and high unworldly endeavor. Again, the invisible voice that came to him through the visible universe was not in him, as has often been asserted, a Pantheistic conception. Almost in the same breath he speaks of “Nature’s self, which is the breath of God,” and “His pure word by miracle revealed.” He tells us that he held the speaking face of earth and heaven to be an organ of intercourse with man,— “Established by the sovereign intellect Who through that bodily image hath diffused, As might appear to the eye of fleeting time, A deathless spirit.” And again, he says that even if the earth was to be burnt up and to disappear, “Yet would the living Presence still subsist Victorious.” To assert this, whatever it may be, is not to preach Pantheism. It is only to make the earth not a mere piece of mechanism but a vital entity, and to regard it as in living and intimate relation with Him who made and upholds it, and speaks to man more or less distinctly through it. I pass now to the second stage, the great turning point in Wordsworth’s mental history, which lay between his residence in France and his settlement at Grasmere, that is, between the years 1793 and 1800.