A few weeks ago, the literary world remembered the birthday of William Wordsworth.  With a last name entirely fitting for his profession of poet, Wordsworth is known as one of the early Romantics, those who, before most of Western Europe had woken up to the intellectual excesses of the Enlightenment, urged readers to think about matters of the heart. 

     Wordsworth's literary heirs, people like Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name just a few, further refined his vision.  Running through all of their writings, however, was an urgency, an urgent call to Western humanity to find a new God.  While people loyal to a particular God, those who, for instance, inhabited the Christian tradition, looked askance at this thought of a new God, they, along with the rest of us, can learn from it.       

      In its evisceration of long standing notions of whom God could be, the Enlightenment took Western humanity into cultural waters that eventually called people to abandon religious affections altogether.  Here is where the Romantics had significant insight.  Though Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics largely rejected the traditional picture of God, they also recognized that, absent allowing some dimension of transcendence into the human experience, humans would become little more than reasoning automatons:  talking heads without hearts.

     Wordsworth understood that "a [human] slumber" neither "hears nor sees; rolled round in earth's diurnal cause, with rocks, stones, and trees."

     We will always live in mystery.