ellectual kinship with the acknowledged
representatives of Nature-Mysticism will, I hope, appear very plainly.

Wordsworth was an eminently sane and manly spirit. He found his
philosophy of life early, and not only preached but lived it
consistently. A Platonist by nature rather than by study, he is
thoroughly Greek in his distrust of strong emotions and in his love of
all which the Greeks included under [Greek: sophrosyne]. He was a
loyal Churchman, but his religion was really almost independent of any
ecclesiastical system. His ecclesiastical sonnets reflect rather the
dignity of the Anglican Church than the ardent piety with which our
other poet-mystics, such as Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw, adorn the
offices of worship. His cast of faith, intellectual and contemplative
rather than fervid, and the solitariness of his thought, forbade him
to find much satisfaction in public ceremonial. He would probably
agree with Galen, who in a very remarkable passage says that the study
of nature, if prosecuted with the same earnestness and intensity which
men bring to the contemplation of the "Mysteries," is even more fitted
than they to reveal the power and wisdom of God; for "_the symbolism
of the mysteries is more obscure than that of nature_."

He shows his affinity with the modern spirit in his firm grasp of
natural _law_. Like George Fox and William Law, he had to face the
shock of giving up his belief in arbitrary interferences. There was a
period when he lost his young faculty of generalisation; when he bowed
before the inexorable dooms of an unknown Lawgiver--"the categorical
imperative," till the gift of intuition was restored to him in fuller
measure. This experience explains his attitude towards natural
science. His reverence for _facts_ never failed him; "the sanctity and
truth of nature," he says, "must not be tricked out with accidental
ornaments"; but he looked askance at the science which tries to erect
itself into a philosophy. Physics, he saw plainly, is an abstract
study: its view of the world is an abstraction for certain purposes,
and possesses less truth than the view of the poet.[371] And yet he
looked forward to a time when science, too, shall be touched with fire
from the altar;--

"Then her heart shall kindle; her dull eye,
Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang
Chained to its object in brute slavery."

And in a remarkable passage of the "Prefaces" he says "If the time
should ever come