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glorious manifestation of nature is the human mind. All the
divine intelligences with which religion has peopled heaven, or
the countless hosts of misshapen fiends which are represented
as crowding the lowest pit of Erebus, these the poet views as
mere phantoms, which he passes unterrified, —

All strength, all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form,
Jehovah with his thunder, and the choir
Of ministering angels, and the empyreal thrones,
I pass them unalarmed.
The poet reserves all his fear and awe for the mind of man,

To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
That Wordsworth's views, even as to the orthodox sense of the
account of the fall in Genesis, were by no means fixed, is
evident from a passage parenthetically thrown into the text of
" The Excursion : "—

From these pure heights
(Whether of actual vision, sensible
To sight and feeling, or that in this sort
Have condescendingly been shadow'd forth
Communications spiritually maintained
And intuitions -moral and divine)
Fell human kind.
This allusion to the worship of the Jews is followed by a
description of the origin of the worship of the Egyptian, the Per-
sian, and the Greek. Now the common principle running
throughout all these details is, that these various worships owe
their birth to the reverence which nature has inspired in the
breasts of different races, who gave their spiritual intuitions
various external embodiments, according to the constitution of
their minds.. The Jews see, or think they see, angels on their
mountain tops. They hear, or think they hear, Jehovah's
voice in the thunder or the wind. The Greeks beheld sporting



96 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS.
