Even Charles Bradlaugh, the first atheist member of Parliament, was haunted by the psalmist’s reproach, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”
What many responded to in Wordsworth’s evocations of Nature’s sacrality was his restoration of a partially obscured link between Nature and the divine.
I give here a short sample of just one of the passages in “Tintern Abbey” where Wordsworth reports undergoing what might be described as a moment of epiphany.