MacDonald was much taken with this passage from Wordsworth's Ode:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,  
        Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
          And cometh from afar: 
        Not in entire forgetfulness, 
        And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come  
        From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
        Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,  
        He sees it in his joy; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
    Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 
      And by the vision splendid
      Is on his way attended;  
At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day.

MacDonald on Wordsworth

"The history of the poetry of Wordsworth is a true reflex of the man himself. The life of Wordsworth was not outwardly eventful, but his inner life was full of conflict, discovery, and progress. His outward life seems to have been so ordered by Providence as to favour the development of the poetic life within. Educated in the country, and spending most of his life in the society of nature, he was not subjected to those violent external changes which have been the lot of some poets. Perfectly fitted as he was to cope with the world, and to fight his way to any desired position, he chose to retire from it, and in solitude to work out what appeared to him to be the true destiny of his life.

The very element in which the mind of Wordsworth lived and moved was a Christian pantheism. Allow me to explain the word. The poets of the Old Testament speak of everything as being the work of God's hand:--We are the "work of his hand;" "The world was made by him." But in the New Testament there is a higher form used to express the relation in which we stand to him--"We are his offspring;" not the work of his hand, but the children that came forth from his heart. Our own poet Goldsmith, with the high instinct of genius, speaks of God as having "loved us into being." Now I think this is not only true with regard to man, but true likewise with regard to the world in which we live. This world is not merely a thing which God hath made, subjecting it to laws; but it is an expression of the thought, the feeling, the heart of God himself. And so it must be; because, if man be the child of God, would he not feel to be out of his element if he lived in a world which came, not from the heart of God, but only from his hand? This Christian pantheism, this belief that God is in everything, and showing himself in everything, has been much brought to the light by the poets of the past generation, and has its influence still, I hope, upon the poets of the present. We are not satisfied that the world should be a proof and varying indication of the intellect of God. That was how Paley viewed it. He taught us to believe there is a God from the mechanism of the world. But, allowing all the argument to be quite correct, what does it prove? A mechanical God, and nothing more..."

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,  
        Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
          And cometh from afar: 
        Not in entire forgetfulness, 
        And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come  
        From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
        Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,  
        He sees it in his joy; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
    Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 
      And by the vision splendid
      Is on his way attended;  
At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day.