...responding: the Intimations Ode. Wordsworth, in turn, was borrowing that "celestial light" from Milton ("So much the rather thou celestial Light / Shine...and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate"), to whom it was compensation for the physical blindness that had presented him with "a universal blank...

...invocation to Urania, and also by the conclusion to Milton's invocation to God's light in Book III: 'thou Celestial Light / Shine inward, and the mind...through all her powers / Irradiate, there plant eyes' (11. 51-3). Yet while he may well move his terrain away from a Christian God of light to an entirely...

...the salvific instruction of his readers. "[T]he mind through all her powers / Irradiate," he prays, "that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight" (3.52-55). Milton saw his own writing as food to be ingested by less enlightened wayfarers; as an evangelical...

...them to that end ; in a question, moreover, where so many adventurers have so miserably miscarried. So much the rather, thou celestial light, Shine inward,...may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight *. * Milton. CHAPTER IV. HAVING thus disposed of the word " Clotc-teach/' which Dr. Ledwich so relied...

...Universal blank Of Nature's works to me expunged and razed, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. So much the rather thou celestial Light Shine inward,...Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and dispense, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. [3.37-55] Things visible to...

..."the book of knowledge fair ... expunged and razed,' calls for 'celestial light' to 'shine inward' that 'I may see and tell /Of things invisible to mortal sight' (III.46-7, 49, 51-2, 54-5). Solitude allows for inspiration, which brings to view its own proper world....