he ground, in matters of religious
sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered down to a
world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook, a world
protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas.
But he is at times also something very different from this, and
something much bolder. A chance expression is overheard and placed in
a new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing long past occurs to him,
a distant object is relieved for a while by a random gleam of
light--accidents turning up for a moment what lies below the surface of
our immediate experience--and he passes from the humble graves and
lowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a Westmoreland church,
on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point,
into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time to
time, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits.

He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences
and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind
us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of
connexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on these
endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge
to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also to
that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the fancy of
the Platonists--the old heresy of Origen. It was in this mood that he
conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when
the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a childhood, as it
seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in
the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over
again, in the passing away of actual youth. It is this ideal childhood
which he celebrates in his famous Ode on the Recollections of
Childhood, and some other poems which may be grouped around it, such as
the lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like what he describes was
actually truer of himself than he seems to have understood; for his own
most delightful poems were really the instinctive productions of
earlier life, and most surely for him, "the first diviner influence of
this world" passed away, more and more completely, in his contact with
experience.

Sometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, imaginative
power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and
expression, a new