takes delight in plunging into an ocean of forests, in hovering over the gulf of cataracts, in meditating on the shores of lakes and rivers and, so to speak, in finding itself alone in the presence of God.” The relation between wild and solitary nature and the romantic idea of the infinite is here obvious. It is an aid to the spirit in throwing off its limitations and so in feeling itself “free.”[212] A greater spiritual elevation it is sometimes asserted is found in Wordsworth’s communings with nature than in those of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. The difference perhaps is less one of spirit than of temperament. In its abdication of the intellectual and critical faculties, in its semi-dissolution of the conscious self, the revery of Wordsworth does not differ from that of Rousseau[213] and Chateaubriand, but the erotic element is absent. In the “Genius of Christianity” Chateaubriand gives a magnificent description of sunset at sea and turns the whole picture into a proof of God. Elsewhere he tells us that it was “not God alone that I contemplated on the waters in the splendor of his works. I saw an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. … I should have sold eternity for one of her caresses. I imagined that she was palpitating behind that veil of the universe that hid her from my eyes,” etc. Wordsworth was at least consistently religious in his attitude towards the landscape: he did not see in it at one moment God, and at another an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. At the same time his idea of spirituality is very remote from the traditional conception. Formerly spirituality was held to be a process of recollection, of gathering one’s self in, that is, towards the centre and not of diffusive emotion; so that when a man wished to pray he retired into his closet, and did not, like a Wordsworth or a Rousseau, fall into an inarticulate ecstasy before the wonders of nature. As for the poets of the past, they inclined as a rule to look on nature as an incentive not to religion but to love. Keble, following Wordsworth, protests on this ground against Aristophanes, and Catullus and Horace and Theocritus. He might have lengthened the list almost indefinitely. Chateaubriand bids us in our devotional moods to betake ourselves “to the religious forest.” La Fontaine is at least as near to normal human experience and also at least as poetical when he warns “fair ones” to “fear the depths of the woods and their vast silence.”[214]