ose who are subject to its influence, as if it did but
reinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual lime
and clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end.
But for Wordsworth, these influences tended to the dignity of human
nature, because they tended to tranquillise it. By raising nature to
the level of human thought he gives it power and expression: he subdues
man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and
coolness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman
"stepping westward," are for him natural objects, almost in the same
sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath. In this
sense the leader of the "Lake School," in spite of an earnest
preoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of
nature. And of nature, after all, in its modesty. The English lake
country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of
Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of
apparently little or familiar things, would have found its true test
had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.
The glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little
about them, had too potent a material life of their own to serve
greatly his poetic purpose.

Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets of
the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]
perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has
always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach
themselves to actual scenes and places. Now what is true of it
everywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where one
generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it was
on this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.
Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local sanctities,
in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a particular spot of
earth with the great events of life, till the low walls, the green
mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of voices, and a sort
of natural oracles, the very religion of these people of the dales
appeared but as another link between them and the earth, and was
literally a religion of nature. It tranquillised them by bringing them
under the placid rule of traditional and narrowly localised
observances. "Grave livers," they seemed to him, under thi