Edinburgh Castle, or the Grampian Hills merely,
might be summoned to mourn in Wordsworth's departure the loss of one of
their truest high-priests, who had gazed into some of the deepest secrets
of the one, and echoed some of the loftiest aspirations of the other.

To soften such grief, however, there comes in the reflection, that the
task of this great poet had been nobly discharged. He _had_ given the
world assurance, full, and heaped, and running over, of what he meant, and
of what was meant by him. While the premature departure of a Schiller, a
Byron, or a Keats, gives us emotions similar to those wherewith we would
behold the crescent moon, snatched away as by some "insatiate archer," up
into the Infinite, ere it grew into its full glory--Wordsworth, like Scott,
Goethe, and Southey, was permitted to fill his full and broad sphere.

What Wordsworth's mission was, may be, perhaps, understood through some
previous remarks upon his great mistress--Nature, as a poetical personage.

There are three methods of contemplating nature. These are the material,
the shadowy, and the mediatorial. The materialist looks upon it as the
great and only reality. It is a vast solid fact, for ever burning and
rolling around, below and above him. The idealist, on the contrary,
regards it as a shadow--a mode of mind--the infinite projection of his own
thought. The man who stands _between_ the two extremes, looks on nature as
a great, but not ultimate or everlasting scheme of mediation, or
compromise, between pure and absolute spirit and humanity--adumbrating God
to man, and bringing man near to God. To the materialist, there is an
altar, star-lighted heaven-high, but no God. To the idealist, there is a
God, but no altar. He who holds the theory of mediation, has the Great
Spirit as his God, and the universe as the altar on which he presents the
gift of his poetical (we do not speak at present so much of his
theological) adoration.

It must be obvious, at once, which of those three views of nature is the
most poetical. It is surely that which keeps the two principles of spirit
and matter distinct and unconfounded--preserves in their proper
relations--the soul and the body of things--God within, and without the
garment by which, in Goethe's grand thought, "we see him by." While one
party deify, and another destroy matter, the third impregnate, without
identifying it with the Divine presence.

The notions suggested by this view, which is th