felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own.  The extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic mood, as here in Shelley’s words, without any logical irreverence:  for pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent, recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley, because of the fundamental character of these facts and the inevitability of the knowledge of them.  The most arrogant thought of man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious life in all its forms.  A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in us, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear’s rags, may come to think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to St. Paul as to Plato.  This intimate and infinite sense of obligation finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed themselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets who found some consecration in their calling.  They, more than other men, know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike.  But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest in the greatest.

“This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing.  He who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent in the world’s service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it:  and how should gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain?  Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born with this thankfulness,—­the feeling of helplessness.  Though the secret and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,—­

    ’Closer is He than breathing and nearer than
    hands and feet,’—­

though in moments of life’s triumphs it evokes this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in the beneficent order of God?  And especially in the more strenuous trials of later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, and under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance, protection.  Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all he