I would not, however, seem to claim too much. The religion which these later poems of Wordsworth's embody is rather the stately tradition of a great Church than the pangs and aspirations of a holy soul. There is little in them--whether for good or evil--of the stuff of which a Paul, a Francis, a Dominic are made. That fervent emotion--akin to the passion of love rather than to intellectual or moral conviction--finds voice through singers of a very different tone. It is fed by an inward anguish, and felicity which, to those who have not felt them, seem as causeless as a lover's moods; by wrestlings not with flesh and blood; by nights of despairing self-abasement; by ecstasies of an incommunicable peace. How great the gulf between Wordsworth and George Herbert!--Herbert "offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither,"--and Wordsworth, for whom the gentle regret of the lines,-- Me this unchartered freedom tires, I feel the weight of chance desires,-- forms his most characteristic expression of the self-judgment of the solitary soul. Wordsworth accomplished one reconciliation of great importance to mankind. He showed, as plainly in his way as Socrates had shown it long ago, with what readiness a profoundly original conception of the scheme of things will shape itself into the mould of an established and venerable faith. He united the religion of the philosopher with the religion of the churchman; one rarer thing he could not do; he could not unite the religion of the philosopher with the religion of the saint. It is, indeed, evident that the most inspiring feeling which breathes through Wordsworth's ecclesiastical pieces is not of a doctrinal, not even of a spiritual kind. The ecclesiastical as well as the political sentiments of his later years are prompted mainly by the admiring love with which he regarded the structure of English society--seen as that society was by him in its simplest and most poetic aspect. This concrete attachment to the scenes about him had always formed an important element in his character. Ideal politics, whether in Church or State, had never occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its informing principles embodied in the England of his own day. The sonnet _On a Parsonage in Oxfordshire_ well illustrates the loving minuteness with which he draws out the beauty and fitness of the established scheme of things,--the power of English country life to satisfy so many moods of feeling.