I have dwelt thus fully on the growth of Wordsworth’s character, the moral discipline through which he passed, and the ultimate maturity of soul to which he attained, in order that we may understand his doctrine regarding Nature. He held that it was only through the soul that the outer world is rightly apprehended—only when it is contemplated through the human emotions of admiration, awe, and love. This he held all his life through. But yet in his way of dealing with Nature, taken as a whole, we shall not be wrong if we note two different, though not conflicting, phases. In his earlier poetic period he was mainly absorbed in the unity and large livingness of Nature—in feeling and interpreting the life that is in each individual thing, as well as in the whole, in substituting for a mere machine,—a universe of death,—one which “Moves with light, and light informed, Actual, divine, and true.” In doing this it is not too much to say that his poetry is the most powerful protest which English literature contains against the views of the world engendered by a mechanical deism—the best witness to the spiritual element that exists both in Nature and in man. Nor less is it our surest antidote to the exclusively analytic and microscopic view of Nature, so tyrannous over present thought, the end of which is universal disintegration. This was the work he did when he worked more in his earlier, what has been called, his naturalistic vein. In his later period the moral tendency became predominant, not that it had ever been absent from his thought. Even at a comparatively early time he had been wont to take the sights and sounds of the sensible world as symbols and correspondences of the invisible. In 1806, hearing the cuckoo’s voice echo from Nab-scar, as he walked on the opposite side of Rydal Mere, he exclaimed:— “Have not we too? yes, we have Answers and we know not whence Echoes from beyond the grave, Recognized intelligence! “Often as thy inward ear Catches such rebounds, beware— Listen, ponder, hold them dear; For of God—of God they are.” Again, in that Evening ode composed in 1818, to which reference has been already made, as he gazes on “The silent spectacle—the gleam— The shadow—and the peace supreme,” he exclaims— “Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad, And see to what fair countries ye are bound!” In his latest phase, as seen in the two poems of 1831, quoted above, the moral has so overpowered the naturalistic mood that this spiritualizing of all Nature into symbols of things unseen is rather obviously obtruded than delicately hinted. However this may be, to do this, to treat Nature in this way, so to interpret it that it shall touch the moral heart of the most thoughtful and apprehensive men—this is one of the two highest functions of inspired Poetry. And in the exercise of this function, too, Wordsworth has taught us much.