“Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the eternal heavens through thee are fresh and strong.”
The passage last quoted from “The Prelude” has the same meaning, and testifies that from and through his communing with Nature he had learnt, even in boyhood, a true and real natural religion—had felt his soul come into contact with Him who is at once the author and upholder of Nature and of man. Not perhaps that, in his school days, he was fully aware of what he then learnt. He felt at the time, he learnt to know what he felt afterwards. At Cambridge, when surrounded by trivial and uncongenial interests, he became aware that he had brought with him from the mountains powers to counterwork these—
“Independent solaces,
Incumbencies more awful, visitings
Front the Upholder of the tranquil soul.”
What then was the spiritual nutriment he had gathered from that boyhood passed in Nature’s immediate presence? He had felt, and after reflection had made the feelings a rooted and habitual conviction, that the world without him, the thing we call Nature, is not a dead machine, but something all pervaded by a life—sometimes he calls it a soul; that this living Nature was a unity; that there was that in it which awoke in him feelings of calmness, awe, and tenderness; that this infinite life in Nature was not something which he attributed to Nature, but that it existed external to him, independent of his thoughts and feelings, and was in no way the creation of his own mind; that, though his faculties in nowise created those qualities in Nature, they might go forth and aspire towards them, and find support in them; that even when he was withdrawn from the presence of that Nature and these qualities, yet that they subsist quite independent of his perceptions of them. And the conviction that Nature there was living on all the same, whether he heeded her or not, imparted to his mind kindred calm and coolness, and fed it with thoughts of majesty. This, or something like it, is the conviction which he tries to express in “The Prelude.” Those vague emotions, those visionary gleams which came to him in the happier moments of boyhood, before which the solid earth was all unsubstantialized and transfigured—these he held to be, though he could not prove it, intimations coming to his soul direct from God. In one of these moments, a glorious summer morning, when he was spending a Cambridge vacation by the Lakes, he for the first time consciously felt himself to be a dedicated spirit, consecrated to truth and purity and high unworldly endeavor.
Again, the invisible voice that came to him through the visible universe was not in him, as has often been asserted, a Pantheistic conception. Almost in the same breath he speaks of
“Nature’s self, which is the breath of God,”