Mysticism is the most salient feature of Wordsworth’s poetry, for he was one who saw, whose inward eye was focussed to visions scarce dreamt of by men.  It is because of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of his vision that he is a difficult poet to understand, and the key to the understanding of him is a mystic one.  People talk of the difficulty of Browning, but he is easy reading compared with a great deal of Wordsworth.  It is just the apparent simplicity of Wordsworth’s thought which is so misleading.  A statement about him of the following kind would be fairly generally accepted as the truth.  Wordsworth was a simple-minded poet with a passion for nature, he found great joy and consolation in the contemplation of the beauty of hills and dales and clouds and flowers, and urged others to find this too; he lived, and recommended others to live a quiet retired unexciting kind of life, and he preached a doctrine of simplicity and austerity.  Now, except that Wordsworth had a passion for Nature, there is not a single true statement here.  Wordsworth was not only a poet, he was also a seer, a mystic and a practical psychologist with an amazingly subtle mind, and an unusual capacity for feeling; he lived a life of excitement and passion, and he preached a doctrine of magnificence and glory.  It was not the beauty of Nature which brought him joy and peace, but the life in Nature.  He himself had caught a vision of that life, he knew it and felt it, and it transformed the whole of existence for him.  He believed that every man could attain this vision which he so fully possessed, and his whole life’s work took the form of a minute and careful analysis of the processes of feeling in his own nature, which he left as a guide for those who would tread the same path.  It would be correct to say that the whole of his poetry is a series of notes and investigations devoted to the practical and detailed explanation of how he considered this state of vision might be reached.  He disdained no experience—­however trivial, apparently—­the working of the mind of a peasant child or an idiot boy, the effect produced on his own emotions by a flower, a glowworm, a bird’s note, a girl’s song; he passed by nothing which might help to throw light on this problem.  The experience which Wordsworth was so anxious others should share was the following.  He found that when his mind was freed from pre-occupation with disturbing objects, petty cares, “little enmities and low desires,” that he could then reach a condition of equilibrium, which he describes as a “wise passiveness,” or a “happy stillness of the mind.”  He believed this condition could be deliberately induced by a kind of relaxation of the will, and by a stilling of the busy intellect and striving desires.  It is a purifying process, an emptying out of all that is worrying, self-assertive, and self-seeking.  If we can habitually train ourselves and attune our minds to this condition, we may at any moment come across something which will