ABSTRACT
To situate William Wordsworth in the context of sensibility is a task both facilitated and complicated by his ambiguous use of the terms 'nature' and 'feeling', and by the fitfully precise yet generally undependable chronology of The Prelude. The early books of The Prelude are anxious to establish the link between the child and nature. In one of Wordsworth's typical alternative explanations for the sense of the 'one life' he canvasses 'the power of truth/Coming in revelation' by which he conversed 'with things that really are'. Wordsworth describes the growth of his love for humanity not as a development of domestic feelings in the way that Coleridge saw benevolence, a process of 'concretion', but as a pure gift of nature. Wordsworth struggled to maintain the faith which had inspired him in France, a faith in social progress supported by a trust in human sensibility.
