But it is not merely in the hard logic of controversy that the Greek Pantheists have left a great legacy to mankind. If I mistake not, the higher poetry of these latter days is deeply indebted to that grandiose theory, that all nature is but one, that all things whether mute or speaking, whether still or moving, whether fair or hideous, are all the manifestations of the one great All, the ineffable substance which some call a world-soul, some the universe, some God, the supreme _One_, without variableness or shadow of turning, though only apprehended by man in myriad variations. You can find that view of things in Shelley, in Wordsworth, in Tennyson, and it is not too much to say that at their highest moments, and in their noblest verse, they are all inspired with this Divine intoxication. It is common to call it Platonism, and my old friend Mr. Shorthouse even wrote an essay to show that the respectable and orderly Wordsworth could hardly be called a Christian, so saturated was he with this Pantheistic feeling. His visions of the pre-existence of the human soul--these were indeed Platonic; his Pantheistic passages come from the influence which Plato acknowledges, but which he does not allow to subjugate him. Wordsworth is the most uneven and often prosaic of poets, but in his greatest moments he too feels that intercommunion of all nature which is unmistakably Greek and not English-- A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,-- A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, And rolls through all things. Time fails me to go into the fascinating subject of the Pantheism of Tennyson, and of other of our poets. It is indeed only spasmodic, but it is there, and is a strange note in the singing of an otherwise tame and prosaic race.