¹ Leavis, Revaluation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949), pp. 181, 179; Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's ‘Prelude‘ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 228-29; Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1964), p. 116; Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963), p. 65.

² Unless otherwise noted, the text of The Ruined Cottage used in this paper is MS. D, published in Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (London: Nelson, 1969), pp. 33–49.

³ This is the original closing line of MS. B, published in Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940-49), v, 404, 1. 147; hereafter Poetical Works will be cited as PW.

⁴ In “ ‘Finer Distance’: The Narrative Art of Wordsworth's ‘The Wanderer,‘ ” ELH, 39 (1972), 87-111, Reeve Parker has artfully traced the “dreaming man” motif of Excursion, Bk. i. In his discussion of these opening lines, Parker emphasizes the dreamer's subjectivity, saying that he, no less than the narrator, is “the prisoner of either an innocent or a willed illusion.” Parker's evidence for this is the “ambiguity of language” and “equivocal connotations” of the description of the dreamer's view (p. 94). I would note that, for Wordsworth, the force of this dual subjectivity is positive rather than invidious—far from despairing that objectivity is impossible, he emphasizes the extent to which the mind creates the world in which it lives.

⁵ For comment on Wordsworth's awareness of the Poetics, see Schneider Ben Ross, Wordsworth's Cambridge Education (Cambridge, Eng.: Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 95, 263. A passage in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads suggests hearsay knowledge: “Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing.” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), i, 139.

⁶ Cleanth Brooks and Jonathan Wordsworth have suggested in passing that something like catharsis is described in the spear grass vision: “Wordsworth and Human Suffering,” in Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism, Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 387; Music of Humanity, p. 99. Differing in emphasis is the opinion that the spear grass vision is essentially elegiac, that it represents the “benign and redemptive power” of natural process. This view has recently been argued by Paul D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 1785-1798 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 177, 180: “At this point the pedlar intervenes, cutting the poet's last ties to the cottage by citing the vision of the speargrass, which in this new position becomes a means of disciplining the poet's grief. Both characters then enact the disengagement of feeling proper to the pastoral elegy.” This reading ignores the psychological nature of the landscape; I would suggest that the sense of natural process in the closing lines comes from the emotional purgation that the rehearsal of Margaret's tale engenders. Implicit in The Ruined Cottage is the view of tragedy described by a contributor to Thomas R. Henn's The Harvest of Tragedy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), p. 273: “I experience a sense of vision, a feeling of harmony within myself extending consciously outwards; a sense of vision that is a frequent reaction to all great art. ... It is not the content of the vision that matters—for me it has no moral, no picture—so much as the capacity that is given to see deeply into the heart of things. Wordsworth's lines have for a long time had a wider content and application for my own experience than the mere description of the effect of nature. [Here he quotes the ‘burthen of the mystery’ passage from Tintern Abbey.] It is then a capacity to see deeply that is the content of the tragic vision, a vision not so much of a man but of Man as a species. While its spell lasts, I see deeply and for that brief moment it would be impossible to act or feel merely human.”

⁷ All references to An Evening Walk are to the 1793 ed., rpt. in PW, i, 4-38.

⁸ Indeed, these are the characteristic responses that poets of the “female vagrant” genre made to the suffering they had evoked; see Cowper's “Crazy Kate,” Southey's “The Widow,” and magazine poems cited by Robert Mayo, “The Contemporanaeity of the Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA, 69 (1954), 486-522.

⁹ Geoffrey Hartman has noted this example of the apparently incongruous juxtaposition of suffering and calm in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 95–96. He, however, ascribes it to the fact that Wordsworth has not resolved his “apocalyptic fears” and his sense of Nature's duality: “There is often no real harmony between what one recognizes again as sterner and milder nature.”

¹⁰ “Contemporanaeity of the Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 495–506.

¹¹ All references to Summer are from James Thomson, Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908), pp. 52–120.

¹² All references to Descriptive Sketches are to the 1793 ed., rpt. in PW, i, 42-90.

¹³ For Wordsworth's reliance on Ramond, see Legouis Emile, The Early Life of William Wordsworth, trans. J. W. Matthews (London: Dent, 1897), pp. 113–14, 475-77.

¹⁴ Wordsworth's note (PW, i, 68, n.) suggests that he associates the Underwalden with the “melancholy disposition.”

¹⁵ The phrase “severe delight” is evidently borrowed from Thomson's Summer where the poet “deep-roused” feels “A sacred terrour, a severe delight” (ll. 540-41). Thomson's vision and “delight” have their source in a commonplace of 18th-century sublime, “the midnight depth / Of younder grove, of wildest largest growth” (ll. 516-17), while Wordsworth, like Burke, finds a source of sublime “delight” in human suffering. It is interesting to note that Thomson's experience also ends in attaining “This holy calm, this harmony of mind. / Where purity and peace immingle charms” (ll. 550-51).

¹⁶ This is MS. 1 of Guilt and Sorrow. The text used is from The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 21–38. It has not been generally realized that this original Salisbury Plain is organized much like The Ruined Cottage. At the beginning of each poem, a man travels on foot, acutely aware of oppressive natural surroundings. He then meets a fellow traveler in a deserted building who tells him a tale of great misery. As each poem concludes, the travelers move off toward shelter in a transformed world of natural serenity.

¹⁷ Moorman See Mary, William Wordsworth: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957-65), i, 232-33.

¹⁸ Finch, “The Ruined Cottage Restored,” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 29–49; Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 321-28, 337-39; Music of Humanity, pp. 9-22; PW, v, 377.

¹⁹ Using such material Jonathan Wordsworth has suggested that the dramatic structure serves “to distance Margaret's suffering, making bearable a story which in its original conclusion was too painful, too abrupt.” He connects the expansion of the poem with the concept of the One Life: “unrelieved sadness is quite incompatible with the Philosophy of Joy now put forward in The Pedlar.” The framework brings the reader “momentarily to believe in a philosophical resolution which outside the context of the poem is presumably unacceptable” (Music of Humanity, pp. 150, 19, 92). Much of this seems plausible, and it is the purpose of this paper not so much to disagree with Jonathan Wordsworth as to point to another issue important to the poet at that time.

²⁰ Dr. Burney's review of Lyrical Ballads from The Monthly Review, 29 (June 1799), rpt. in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 317.

²¹ The seminal spokesman for this view in the 18th century was René Dubos, although both Dennis and Rapin had expressed it earlier. For 2 fine studies of the pleasures of pathos in the 18th century, see Earl R. Wasserman, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” ELH, 14 (1947), 283-307, and Baxter Hathaway, “The Lucretian ‘Return upon Ourselves’ in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Tragedy,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 672-89. The references to the historical background in this paper largely follow Wasserman and Hathaway.

²² Burke Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 44–48.

²³ Wordsworth's dalliance with the notion of pantheistic sympathy has long been noted. For discussions of this subject, see Piper Herbert W., The Active Universe (London: Athlone, 1962); Eric D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 38–61; Music of Humanity, pp. 184-232.

²⁴ The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, i (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 1616.

²⁵ The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 445. This phrase is from the “spots of time” passage in MS. V of The Prelude. In the original context, the “spots of time” declaration was closely allied to the response to fictional suffering. It came immediately following a discussion of the “tragic facts of rural history” to be found in Prelude, p. 163. All references to The Prelude are from the de Selincourt-Darbishire edition and the 1805 version, unless noted otherwise.

²⁶ In PW, v, 402, Darbishire reads “pain” as “clearly a copyist's error” and substitutes “power” from MS. D. However, in D “pain” is the original fair-copy reading; see Music of Humanity, p. 271.

²⁷ Prelude ii, ll. 367 68; i, ll. 488-89; ii, ll. 27-28; i. ll. 360-61. For a suggestive reading of this phenomenon, see David Rogers, “The Wordsworthian Repose,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 13 (1968), 39-47.

²⁸ The text of MS. 2 of Guilt and Sorrow is available in Salisbury Plain Poems, pp. 123–54.

²⁹ The text of Peter Bell is among the most complicated in the Wordsworth canon. I have had the advantage of working with Floyd G. Stoppard's unpublished dissertation, “Wordsworth's Peter Bell: A Critical Edition,” Cornell 1965. Within this paper I have given the approximate location in PW.