There is our mystic yet again leading the way.

A supreme regard for science, and the worship of power, go hand in hand:  that knowledge is power has been esteemed the grandest incitement to study.  Yet the antidote to the disproportionate cultivation of science, is simply power in its crude form—­breaking out, that is, as brute force.  When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the wild beast in man breaks from its den, and chaos returns.  But all the noblest minds in Europe looked for grand things in the aurora of this uprising of the people.  To the terrible disappointment that followed, we are indebted for the training of Wordsworth to the priesthood of nature’s temple.  So was he possessed with the hope of a coming deliverance for the nations, that he spent many months in France during the Revolution.  At length he was forced to seek safety at home.  Dejected even to hopelessness for a time, he believed in nothing.  How could there be a God that ruled in the earth when such a rising sun of promise was permitted to set in such a sea!  But for man to worship himself is a far more terrible thing than that blood should flow like water:  the righteous plague of God allowed things to go as they would for a time.  But the power of God came upon Wordsworth—­I cannot say as it had never come before, but with an added insight which made him recognize in the fresh gift all that he had known and felt of such in the past.  To him, as to Cowper, the benignities of nature restored peace and calmness and hope—­sufficient to enable him to look back and gather wisdom.  He was first troubled, then quieted, and then taught.  Such presence of the Father has been an infinitely more active power in the redemption of men than men have yet become capable of perceiving.  The divine expressions of Nature, that is, the face of the Father therein visible, began to heal the plague which the worship of knowledge had bred.  And the power of her teaching grew from comfort to prayer, as will be seen in the poem I shall give.  Higher than all that Nature can do in the way of direct lessoning, is the production of such holy moods as result in hope, conscience of duty, and supplication.  Those who have never felt it have to be told there is in her such a power—­yielding to which, the meek inherit the earth.

  NINTH EVENING VOLUNTARY.

  Composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty.

  I.

  Had this effulgence disappeared
  With flying haste, I might have sent
  Among the speechless clouds a look
  Of blank astonishment;
  But ’tis endued with power to stay,
  And sanctify one closing day,
  That frail Mortality may see—­
  What is?—­ah no, but what can be! 
  Time was when field and watery cove
  With modulated echoes rang,