Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in the mind.”
These were his supreme moments of existence, when the vision first dawned upon his soul, when without knowing it he was baptized with an effluence from on high, consecrated to be the poet-priest of Nature’s mysteries. The light that then came to him was in after years “the master-light of all his seeing,” the fountain-head of his highest inspirations. From this was drawn that peculiar ethereal gleam which rests on his finest after productions—the ode to the Cuckoo, the poems on Matthew, Tintern Abbey, the Intimations of Immortality, and many another poem. Not that he knew in these accesses of soul what he was receiving. He felt them at the time, and passed on. Only long afterwards, when
“The eagerness of infantine desire”
was over, in hours of tranquil thought, the remembrance of those bright moments recurred, with a sense of distance from his present self so remote, that
“Often did he seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of himself,