omes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like

Golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds.

Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of nature. In this province he
was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there
was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen
years before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the
Hall_, came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called
Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely
accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs
a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a
shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor
Cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth,

The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.

In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an
oak-tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect
distinctly the very spot where this struck me. The moment was important
in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the
infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the
poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in some
degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been impatient
of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains, conceiving
himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But Wordsworth did
not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has said that the
office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of Nature." Such,
at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was alive and
divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena,

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.

He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of pantheism which
identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who
identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in
Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles
with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young,
they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after
the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went together
to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literatu