The first step on the way that leads to God was the sense of the boundless, growing out of musings on the finite; and with it the conviction that the Infinite and Eternal alone can be our being’s heart and home—­“we feel that we are greater than we know.[383]” Then came to him—­

                   “The sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
  And rolls through all things.[384]”

The worldliness and artificiality which set us out of tune with all this is worse than paganism.[385] Then this “higher Pantheism” developed into the sense of an all-pervading Personality, “a soul that is the eternity of thought.”  And with this heightened consciousness of the nature of God came also a deeper knowledge of his own personality, a knowledge which he describes in true mystical language as a “sinking into self from thought to thought.”  This may continue till man can at last “breathe in worlds to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil,” and perceive “the forms whose kingdom is where time and space are not.”  These last lines describe a state analogous to the [Greek:  opsis] of the Neoplatonists, and the excessus mentis of the Catholic mystics.  At this advanced stage the priest of Nature may surrender himself to ecstasy without mistrust.  Of such minds he says—­

                  “The highest bliss
  That flesh can know is theirs—­the consciousness
  Of whom they are, habitually infused
  Through every image and through every thought,
  And all affections by communion raised
  From earth to heaven, from human to divine;... 
  Thence cheerfulness for acts of daily life,
  Emotions which best foresight need not fear,
  Most worthy then of trust when most intense.[386]”

There are many other places where he describes this “bliss ineffable,” when “all his thoughts were steeped in feeling,” as he listened to the song which every form of creature sings “as it looks towards the uncreated with a countenance of adoration and an eye of love,[387]” that blessed mood—­

  “In which the affections gently lead us on,—­
   Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
   And even the motion of our human blood
   Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
   In body, and become a living soul: 
   While with an eye made quiet by the power
   Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
   We see into the life of things.[388]”