ABSTRACT
The previous books, in spite of the ostensibly educational element in the titles of three of them, have looked ‘Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven’ (12) as ‘prime teacher’ (13) and not at book learning at all. Education has meant education ‘by beauty and by fear’ (I: 306), and it might be assumed that in this Book Wordsworth is going to make amends for his omissions by considering the value of culture in his life. The paragraph shows, however, that what emerges much more clearly from his considerations is a frightening sense of the impermanence of art in the face of the much more enduring and ultimately alien powers of Nature.
