RELIGION 



"The meanest flower that blows " can bring to 

 Wordsworth "thoughts that do .often lie too deep 

 for tears." How impossible such a poet as he in an 

 earlier time! With all his outward adherence to a 

 religion of creeds and rituals, he was at heart the 

 poet of Nature. His attitude toward her was a reli- 

 gious attitude, as has been more or less the attitude 

 of the leading poets since his day. "The primal 

 sympathy " which he celebrates — the sympathy 

 with birds, flowers, trees, rocks, winds, waves — 

 we are all more and more conscious of, partly be- 

 cause he gave that sympathy utterance in such in- 

 spired lines, and partly because science has given 

 us a more intelligent conception of the mysteries 

 and the glories that surround us. Many of us can 

 now say with him : — 



"And I have felt 

 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 

 Of something far more deeply interfused. 

 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

 And the round ocean and the living air, 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 

 A motion and a spirit, that impels 

 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

 And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 

 A lover of the meadows and the woods, 

 And mountains; and of all that we behold 

 From this green earth; of all the mighty world 

 Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create, 

 And what perceive; well pleased to recognize 

 In nature and the language of the sense, 



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