ty. Mere acuteness of
vision it can not have been, else the eagle might have _felt_, though not
written, "The Excursion"--else the fact is not accountable why many of weak
sight, such as Burke, have been rapturous admirers of Nature; and so, till
we learn that Mr. De Quincey has looked through Wordsworth's eyes, we must
call this a mere fancy. Hazlitt again, and others since, have accounted
for the phenomenon by association--but this fails, we suspect, fully to
explain the deep, native, and brooding passion in question--a passion
which, instead of being swelled by the associations of after life, rose to
lull stature in youth, as "Tintern Abbey" testifies. One word of his own,
perhaps, better solves the mystery--it is the one word "consecration"--

"The _consecration_ and the poet's dream."

His eye had been anointed with eye-salve, and he saw, as his
poet-predecessors had done, the temple in which he was standing, heard in
every breeze and ocean billow the sound of a temple-service, and felt that
the grandeur of the ritual, and of its recipient, threw the shadow of
their greatness upon every stone in the corners of the edifice, and upon
every eft crawling along its floors. Reversing the miracle, he saw "trees
as men walking"--heard the speechless sins, and, in the beautiful thought
of "the Roman," caught on his ear the fragments of a "divine soliloquy,"
filling up the pauses in a universal anthem. Hence the tumultuous, yet
awful joy of his youthful feelings to Nature. Hence his estimation of its
lowliest features; for does not every bush and tree appear to him a
"pillar in the temple of his God?" The leaping fish pleases him, because
its "cheer" in the lonely tarn is of praise. The dropping of the earth on
the coffin lid, is a slow and solemn psalm, mingling in austere sympathy
with the raven's croak, and in his "Power of sound" he proceeds
elaborately to condense all those varied voices, high or low, soft or
harsh, united or discordant, into one crushing chorus, like the choruses
of Haydn, or of heaven. Nature undergoes no outward change to his _eye_,
but undergoes a far deeper transfiguration to his spirit--as she stands up
in the white robes, and with the sounding psalmodies of her mediatorial
office, between him and the Infinite I AM.

Never must this feeling be confounded with Pantheism. All does not seem to
him to be God, nor even (strictly speaking) divine; but all seems to be
immediately _from_ God--rus