his judgments, the test which he applied to his recollected impressions is clear.  He attached most value to those which brought with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, transfusing and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring with its radiance, rocks and fields and trees and the men and women who lived close enough to them to partake of their strength—­the sense, as he calls it in his Lines above Tintern Abbey of something “more deeply interfused” by which all nature is made one.  Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is conceived as law.  Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the daughter of the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.  But in most of his poems its ends do not trouble; it is omnipresent; it penetrates everything and transfigures everything; it is God.  It was Wordsworth’s belief that the perception of this indwelling spirit weakened as age grew.  For a few precious and glorious years he had the vision

“When meadow, grove, and stream,
 The earth, and every common sight
   To me did seem
 Apparelled in celestial light,
  The glory and the freshness of a dream.”

Then as childhood, when “these intimations of immortality,” this perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and further away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light of common day.  He had his memories and that was all.

There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and Wordsworth’s beliefs were inextricably entangled with the conception which Coleridge borrowed from German philosophy.

“We receive but what we give”

wrote Coleridge to his friend,

“And in our life alone doth Nature live.”

And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind.  It is easy to pass from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise not to follow.

If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which is best described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has justification for the phrase “Renascence of Wonder.”  He revived the supernatural as a literary force, emancipated it from the crude mechanism which had been applied to it by dilettantes like Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested it instead with that air of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives the highest potency to it in its effect on the imagination.  But Coleridge is more noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for what he did in himself.  His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth’s, unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he seldom finished what he began.  The Ancient Mariner, indeed, which was the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work. Christabel is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening’s intoxication