It will be interesting to compare the steps in the ladder of perfection, as described by Wordsworth, with the schemes of Neoplatonism and introspective Mysticism.  The three stages of the mystical ascent have been already explained.  We find that Wordsworth, too, had his purgative, disciplinary stage.  He began by deliberately crushing, not only the ardent passions to which he tells us that he was naturally prone, but all ambition and love of money, determining to confine himself to “such objects as excite no morbid passions, no disquietude, no vengeance, and no hatred,” and found his reward in a settled state of calm serenity, in which all the thoughts flow like a clear fountain, and have forgotten how to hate and how to despise.[376]

Wordsworth is careful to inculcate several safeguards for those who would proceed to the contemplative life.  First, there must be strenuous aspiration to reach that infinitude which is our being’s heart and home; we must press forward, urged by “hope that can never die, effort, and expectation, and desire, and something evermore about to be.[377]” The mind which is set upon the unchanging will not “praise a cloud,[378]” but will “crave objects that endure.”  In the spirit of true Platonism, as contrasted with its later aberrations, Wordsworth will have no blurred outlines.  He tries always to see in Nature distinction without separation; his principle is the exact antithesis of Hume’s atheistic dictum, that “things are conjoined, but not connected.[379]” The importance of this caution has been fully demonstrated in the course of our inquiry.  Then, too, he knows that to imperfect man reason is a crown “still to be courted, never to be won.”  Delusions may affect “even the very faculty of sight,” whether a man “look forth,” or “dive into himself.[380]” Again, he bids us seek for real, and not fanciful analogies; no “loose types of things through all degrees”; no mythology; and no arbitrary symbolism.  The symbolic value of natural objects is not that they remind us of something that they are not, but that they help us to understand something that they in part are.  They are not intended to transport us away from this earth into the clouds.  “This earth is the world of all of us,” he says boldly, “in which we find our happiness or not at all.[381]” Lastly, and this is perhaps the most important of all, he recognises that the still small voice of God breathes not out of nature alone, nor out of the soul alone, but from the contact of the soul with nature.  It is the marriage of the intellect of man to “this goodly universe, in love and holy passion,” which produces these raptures.  “Intellect” includes Imagination, which is but another name for Reason in her most exalted mood;[382] these must assist the eye of sense.

Such is the discipline, and such are the counsels, by which the priest of Nature must prepare himself to approach her mysteries.  And what are the truths which contemplation revealed to him?