arouse our emotions, and it is then, when our emotions—­thus purified—­are excited to the point of passion, that our vision becomes sufficiently clear to enable us to gain actual experience of the “central peace subsisting for ever at the heart of endless agitation.”  Once seen, this vision changes for us the whole of life; it reveals unity in what to our every-day sight appears to be diversity, harmony where ordinarily we hear but discord, and joy, overmastering joy, instead of sorrow.

It is a kind of illumination, whereby in a lightning flash we see that the world is quite different from what it ordinarily appears to be, and when it is over—­for the experience is but momentary—­it is impossible to describe the vision in precise terms, but the effect of it is such as to inspire and guide the whole subsequent life of the seer.  Wordsworth several times depicts this “bliss ineffable” when “all his thought were steeped in feeling.”  The well-known passage in Tintern Abbey already quoted (p. 7) is one of the finest analysis of it left us by any of the seers, and it closely resembles the accounts given by Plotinus and Boehme of similar experiences.

To Wordsworth this vision came through Nature, and for this reason.  He believed that all we see round us is alive, beating with the same life which pulsates in us.  It is, he says,—­

      my faith that every flower
    Enjoys the air it breathes.

and that if we will but listen and look, we will hear and see and feel this central life.  This is the pith of the message we find repeated again and again in various forms throughout Wordsworth’s poetry, and perhaps best summed up at the end of the fourth book of the Excursion, a book which should be closely studied by any one who would explore the secret of the poet’s outlook upon life.  He tells us in the Prelude (Book iii.) that even in boyhood it was by this feeling he “mounted to community with highest truth”—­

    To every natural form, rock, fruits, or flower,
    Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
    I gave a moral life:  I saw them feel,
    Or linked them to some feeling:  the great mass
    Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
    That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

Wordsworth, in short, was haunted by the belief that the secret of the universe is written clearly all round us, could we but train and purify our mind and emotions so as to behold it.  He believed that we are in something the same attitude towards Nature as an illiterate untrained person might be in the presence of a book containing the philosophy of Hegel.  To the educated trained thinker, who by long and arduous discipline has developed his mental powers, that book contains the revelation of the thought of a great mind; whereas to the uneducated person it is merely a bundle of paper with words printed on it.  He can handle it, touch it, see it, he can read the words, he can even understand many of them separately, but the essence of the book and its meaning remains closed to him until he can effect some alteration in himself which will enable him to understand it.