I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And as I rose upon the stroke my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan;-- When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again; And, growing still in stature, the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own, And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the covert of the willow-tree; There in her mooring-place I left my bark, And through the meadows homeward went, in grave And serious mood. But after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts There hung a darkness--call it solitude, Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly thro' the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. In the controversy as to the origin of the worship of inanimate objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage might fairly be cited as an example of the manner in which those objects, or those powers, can impress the mind with that awe which is the foundation of savage creeds, while yet they are not identified with any human intelligence, such as the spirits of ancestors or the like, nor even supposed to operate according to any human, analogy. Up to this point Wordsworth's reminiscences may seem simply to illustrate the conclusions which science reaches by other roads. But he is not content with merely recording and analyzing his childish impressions; he implies, or even asserts, that these "fancies from afar are brought"--that the child's view of the world reveals to him truths which the man with difficulty retains or recovers. This is not the usual teaching of science, yet it would be hard to assert that it is absolutely impossible. The child's instincts may well be supposed to partake in larger measure of the general instincts of the race, in smaller measure of the special instincts of his own country and century, than is the case with the man. Now the feelings and beliefs of each successive century will probably be, on the whole, superior to those of any previous century. But this is not universally true; the teaching of each generation does not thus sum up the results of the whole past. And thus the child, to whom in a certain sense the past of humanity is present,--who is living through the whole life of the race in little, before he lives the life of his century in large,--may possibly dimly apprehend something more of truth in certain directions than is visible to the adults around him.