ABSTRACT
The first passage is taken from the 1805 version of The Prelude: Yet in the midst. Here, from The Prelude, is a further example of ingenious double-talk: No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees. The mountain gives its grandeur and shapes the soul immediately, just as, in The Prelude Book II, the water lies upon the mind directly with a weight of pleasure. No principle of association, no mediation between man and nature, is invoked to explain how nature educates the soul. For that which shapes the outward prospect by the same token shapes the inward. Wordsworth's poetry often implies, and occasionally claims explicitly, that the feeling attendant upon an act of sense- perception is quite as objective as the things that are sensed. The famous skating episode in The Prelude provides of the fact that Wordsworth was habitually per-plexed by the relation of things to their reflections.
