When the mind and soul have been prepared, the next step is concentration, aspiration.  Then it is borne in upon the poet that in the infinite and in the eternal alone can we find rest, can we find ourselves; and towards this infinitude we must strive with unflagging ardour;

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there.

Prelude, Book vi. 604.

The result of this aspiration towards the infinite is a quickening of consciousness, upon which follows the attainment of the third or unitive stage, the moment when man can “breathe in worlds to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil,” and perceive “the forms whose kingdom is where time and place are not.”  Such minds—­

need not extraordinary calls
To rouse them; in a world of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
... the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs—­the consciousness
Of Whom they are.

Prelude, Book xiv. 105, 113,

Wordsworth possessed in a peculiar degree a mystic sense of infinity, of the boundless, of the opening-out of the world of our normal finite experience into the transcendental; and he had a rare power of putting this into words.  It was a feeling which, as he tells us in the Prelude (Book xiii.), he had from earliest childhood, when the disappearing line of the public highway—­

    Was like an invitation into space
    Boundless, or guide into eternity,

a feeling which, applied to man, gives that inspiriting certitude of boundless growth, when the soul has—­

     ... an obscure sense
    Of possible sublimity, whereto
    With growing faculties she doth aspire.

It is at this point, and on this subject, that Wordsworth’s poetical and ethical imagination are most nearly fused.  This fusion is far from constant with him; and the result is that there are tracts of his writings where the sentiments are excellent, the philosophy illuminating, but the poetry is not great:  it does not awaken the “transcendental feeling."[22] The moments when this condition is most fully attained by Wordsworth occur when, by sheer force of poetic imagination combined with spiritual insight, in some mysterious and indescribable way, he flashes upon us a sensation of boundless infinity.  Herein consists the peculiar magic of such a poem as Stepping Westward; and there is a touch of the same feeling in the Solitary Reaper.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on other mystical elements in Wordsworth, such as his belief in the one law governing all things, “from creeping plant to sovereign man,” and the hint of belief in pre-existence in the Ode on Immortality.  His attitude towards life as a whole is to be found in a few lines in the “after-thought” to the Duddon sonnets.