¹ xiv.206–207. In the A text he uses the term “intellectual” at ll. 166 and 186. In the final version he uses “spiritual” at l. 188 and “intellectual” at l. 207. See Ernest de Selincourt's variorum edition, pp. 490–493. All quotations and references are to the second edition, revised by Helen Darbishire, Oxford, 1959.

² Consider, for example, three book-length studies of the poem. In The Mind of the Poet (Baltimore, Md., 1941) the late Raymond D. Havens begins with ten introductory essays. The last and longest is on imagination, which he regards as the theme. There is none on intellectual love, though Wordsworth says the two themes are “each in each, and cannot stand/Dividually” (xiv.208–209). The other nine essays are on Professor Havens' own topics, not Wordsworth's. In the second part of the book, an almost line-byline comment, the secondary theme is forced upon him. He defines some of the terms accurately, but he does not trace out the argument Wordsworth develops through lines 130–301 (he divides the last book into two parts, at line 231); does not see its place in the total structure of the poem; misinterprets many details, including the date Wordsworth implies for the “very going-out of youth” (line 243) and thus for the terminus of the poem; and quarrels with the poet for contradicting himself, for bringing in Mary, and, like de Selincourt before him, for ingratitude toward Coleridge.

In Wordsworth's Prelude (Ithaca, N. Y., 1953) Abbie F. Potts does not distinguish between the two themes. She speaks of intellectual love or imagination and equates them both with Coleridge's esemplastic power; she relates intellectual love to Spenser's Holiness and Heavenly Love and Cowper's Charity; and she puns with the term—the poet and nature are engaged in an intellectual love affair.

In his rhetorical analysis, On Wordsworth's “Prelude” (Princeton, 1963), Herbert Lindenberger is not obliged to reckon with the themes of the poem, but what he treats as “pathos” and “ethos” (pp. 23–39) involves the theme of intellectual love, and his treatment would be sharper and more significant if he had recognized this fact.

Another scholar, Newton P. Stallknecht, in Strange Seas of Thought (Durham, N. C., 1945), gives considerable space to what he recognizes as an important theme. But he is misled by what seems to me a purely verbal coincidence and by a lax method. Wordsworth's term reminds him of Spinoza's “intellectual love of God.” This intellectual love is “that very love of God whereby God loves himself,” and, as manifested in man, it is “the ecstatic contemplation of the divinity as the source of our highest joy.” And then, by way of Coleridge's conversation, this “ecstatic contemplation of the divinity as the source of our highest joy” becomes the intellectual love of The Prelude. This interpretation, it seems to me, neither derives from nor illuminates Unes 130–301 of the last book. It may have some relevance to lines 112–116 (“the consciousness/Of Whom they are, habitually infused/Through every image and through every thought”); but the first 129 lines have to do with imagination, not intellectual love.

³ See de Selincourt, p. 135, for the following passage, at the end of the D and E versions of the story of the discharged soldier:

This passed, and he who deigns to mark with care

By what rules governed, with what end in view

This work proceeds, he will not wish for more.

⁴ At ll. 232–235, Wordsworth, addressing Dorothy as “Sister of my soul,” says

Thanks in sincerest verse have been elsewhere

Poured out for all the early tenderness

Which I from thee imbibed. ...

“Elsewhere” is The Sparrow's Nest:

The Blessing of my later years

Was with me when a boy:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;

And humble cares, and delicate fears;

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love, and thought, and joy.

H. W. Garrod (Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays, 2nd ed., 1927) took from this stanza a chapter title “Eyes and Ears.” These, he says (p. 108), were the only gifts for which he had any use; but here, as elsewhere, the gift of tenderness is put in the climactic position.

⁵ At vi.259–264, Wordsworth says,

Throughout this narrative,

Else sooner ended, I have borne in mind

For whom it registers the birth, and marks the growth,

Of gentleness, simplicity, and truth,

And joyous loves, that hallow innocent days

Of peace and self-command.

⁶ The Complete Poetical Works ..., ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), i, 168, apparatus. In the MS note quoted here Coleridge contrasts the two odes and calls the later one “a kind of Palinodia.”

⁷ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford, 1956), ii, 394–398.

⁸ The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1949), v, 377. The two poems share details of the description of the cottage.

⁹ The Poetical Works ..., ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1940), i, 314–316.

¹⁰ The Poetical Works, v, 379–404, esp. pp. 380–388.

¹¹ The Old Cumberland Beggar should be excepted if it was begun at Racedown. Its tenor is that of his maturity. One might read it as saying that one impulse from an aged beggar may teach you more ...

¹² The Letters of “William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), iii, 1159.