Even when he spoke of the "paradise where I was reared" and contrasted the "race of real children" brought up close to nature with those brought up in "the perpetual whirl / of trivial objects," the dominant emotion in Wordsworth's early work was gratitude, not regret for innocence no longer accessible. It was an emotion, however—this "grateful acknowledgment" of "what was given me"—that Wordsworth found hard to sustain in verse; and it began to pass over, in the poem that eventually established itself as the popular favorite, Intimations of Immortality, into an elegiac mood that most of his admirers found more congenial, as it turned out—more familiar and hence reassuring, notwithstanding its evocation of loss—than the strenuous mood of The Prelude.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Though Wordsworth continued to insist,

We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind,

the immortality ode conveyed the death of childhood more vividly than it conveyed the consolations available to a mature and "philosophic mind." ^* It was not altogether surprising, then, that the nineteenth cen

____________________

well as its broader connotations (which seldom fail to accompany Wordsworth's use of the word) of vitality, animating force, and even virility. Elsewhere Wordsworth describes the inspiration the child draws from nature—more precisely, the memory of this inspiration—as a "breeze, that gently moved / With quickening virtue, but is now become / A tempest, a redundant energy, / Vexing its own creation." In still another suggestive passage, he characterizes the infant's sense of security, in its mother's arms, as a "virtue which irradiates and exalts" his surroundings and serves to "connect him with the world." It is the buried memory of primeval experiences of this kind that makes of "simple childhood something of the base" on which the "greatness" of man comes to rest.

*	As Philip Davis observes, nineteenth-century readers paid more attention to the end of one stanza, in which the poet addresses the little child:

-90-