Another effect which
Wordsworth had upon me, and has had on other people, was the
modification, altogether unintentional on his part, of religious
belief. He never dreams of attacking anybody for his creed, and yet
it often becomes impossible for those who study him and care for him
to be members of any orthodox religious community. At any rate it
would have been impossible in the town of Bedford. His poems imply
a living God, different from the artificial God of the churches.
The revolution wrought by him goes far deeper, and is far more
permanent than any which is the work of Biblical critics, and it was
Wordsworth and not German research which caused my expulsion from
New College, of which a page or two further on. For some time I had
no thought of heresy, but the seed was there, and was alive just as
much as the seed-corn is alive all the time it lies in the earth
apparently dead.
I have nothing particular to record of Cheshunt, the secluded
Hertfordshire village, where the Countess of Huntingdon's College
then was. It stood in a delightful little half park, half garden,
through which ran the New River: the country round was quiet, and
not then suburban, but here and there was a large handsome Georgian
house.
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