96 Walks in New England 



&quot; A primrose by a river s brim 

 A yellow primrose was to him, 

 And it was nothing more, &quot; 



and further, 



&quot; The soft blue sky did never melt 

 Into his heart ; he never felt 



The witchery of the soft blue sky, &quot; 



he appealed to so few that these and like lines 

 were among those which received the most con 

 temptuous mockery of the wits and scholars of the 

 time. They could not possibly understand what 

 the man was driving at. But now there are very 

 few who fail to see what Wordsworth meant, for the 

 spiritual conception of the universe has stolen into 

 the sense of all thinkers or been thrust there by 

 the very remarkable advances of science. That 

 way all the researches of physics and biology tend, 

 and so at last the Wordsworth idea has become a 

 part of thought, and the love of Nature as the very 

 life of the divine spirit is no longer a matter for 

 mockery. Whether in the flower of the field or 

 the star in the sky, God dwells ; and no life can 

 be dissevered from that all-pervading and all-en 

 compassing spirit. 



