nature almost, from the prompting of the observant
mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself,
flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he
would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived--that old isolating
thought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and modern times.

[56] At other times, again, in those periods of intense susceptibility,
in which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient of
external influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit of
life in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of which
man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments--that old
dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, in
which some had desired to lose themselves, and others had become
indifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. It would come,
sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell: the
network of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common,
universal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, above
the green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogether
different in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was full
of the brooding power of one universal spirit.

And so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascination of
bold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon them to
conditions of poetical thought. He uses them, indeed, always with a
very fine apprehension of the limits within which alone philosophical
imaginings have any place in true poetry; and using them only for
poetical purposes, is not too careful even to make them consistent with
each other. To him, theories which for other men [57] bring a world of
technical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as in those two
lofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and the
restoration of Imagination and Taste. Skirting the borders of this
world of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first exciting
influence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great imaginative
theories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an understanding of
them; and it is not under the influence of these thoughts that his
poetry becomes tedious or loses its blitheness. He keeps them, too,
always within certain ethical bounds, so that no word of his could
offend the simplest of those simple souls which are always the largest
portion of mankind. But it i