Such influences
have sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them,
at the least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies.
To Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He raises physical nature to
the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
therewith a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity.
Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights
of the human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the
perishing human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption,
has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which
attach themselves to definite scenes and places. And what is true of
it everywhere is truest in those secluded valleys, where one
generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and [101]
it was on this side that Wordsworth apprehended religion most
strongly. Having so much to do with the recognition of local
sanctities, the habit of connecting the very trees and stones of a
particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till the low
walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full
of oracular voices, even the religion of those people of the dales
appeared but as another link between them and the solemn imageries of
the natural world.
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