Spirit and Essence in The Prelude of William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So it is now I am a Man;
So be it when I am a Man;
So be it when I am old,
Or let me die!
The child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety. 

~ William Wordsworth

Much has been written by historians and literary critics about the debt that romantic poets and thinkers owe to the age of Romanticism. The prevalent view among many critics has been to focus attention on the style and content of the work of the writers of that period in lieu of the spirit of the age. This seems reasonable. It is an undeniable reality of human life that man must live during a given time and occupy a specific place, and that we embrace, reject or live oblivious to some or all of the prevailing ideas, mores and customs of our time.

For a long time, literary critics have accepted this reasonable truism as a matter of course, one that is part of our quest to understand human cultural and intellectual history. This basic tenet of what I will refer to as historical realism has been increasingly exaggerated in recent times and has deformed into destructive historicism. In many instances, historicism has metamorphosed into reductionism which has little bearing on the work of many writers and thinkers who lived during the age of Romanticism.

In other words, writers and thinkers of what is considered the Romantic period have been pigeonholed to fit the constrained image that historicists have of them. The latter view holds that writers and thinkers create according to the age in which they live, and are often motivated to rebel against the preceding age. This is simplistic. In many regards, this viewpoint is more amenable to art history than it is to intellectual history. This is the case for several reasons. Suffice it to say that while art history depends a great deal on evolving artistic techniques and the evolution of the materials at an artist’s disposal, the same cannot be said for the intrinsic purpose of aesthetic contemplation, the nature of transcendence, the interaction with the sublime, the discovery of objective principles, and essences that thoughtful writers and thinkers address. The latter are relevant characteristics that inform William Wordsworth’s thought and poetry.  

Historical reductionism accentuates a stereotypical and clichéd view of the Age of Romanticism (1798-1823). This is a product of the cultural biases of postmodernism, not an accurate portrayal of the Romantic period. A reductionist view of the Romantic age can be accepted, to a certain extent, as long as it does not rob writers and thinkers of the merit of their voices. Naïve historicism’s interpretation of intellectual history fails to recognize the contribution that personal vocation makes to culture, civilization and the history of ideas. One can cite many anomalies in Romanticism that cannot, in goodwill, be easily explained away as being a reaction to the Enlightenment (1650-1700).

In the case of William Wordsworth, a careful and sincere reading of his work, especially The Prelude, quickly dispels the many vacuous and irrelevant claims of the most vociferous historicists. This is the case because Wordsworth is an essentialist. That is, he recognizes that the structure and order of human reality readily point to essences that serve as its foundation. 

To make matters worse, because historicism, in its many variegated forms, has taken a markedly philosophical materialist direction in recent times, whatever value one could formerly reap from historicity as a valid method of lived-historical analysis, like the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, for instance, has now been turned into an unimaginative handmaiden of philosophical materialism. Unfortunately, the latter brings with it many calamitous social/political trappings that negate the worth and impact of imagination and the creative process, and which ultimately undermine philosophical reflection altogether.

There is an abundance of irregularities in Romanticism that refute the suggestion that that period was merely a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. While it is correct to assume that the embrace of subjectivity is a central component of romantic thought, this is by no means exclusive to Romanticism. The “romantic” concern is a staple of the history of philosophy and intellectual history, dating back to Gilgamesh‘s search for immortality. Respect for individual, concrete persons is another aspect of Romanticism that is not solely the discovery of Romantic thinkers. These are two fundamental and recurrent themes that one encounters in Wordsworth’s work.

Wordsworth’s Encounter with Spirit

It is appropriate that I begin this exposition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude by citing another of his majestic works: “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” This ode to immortality is a work that Wordsworth completed in 1804, during the time he was writing The Prelude. This is significant. Even though this is a shorter, less autobiographical work, “Ode to Immortality” contains many of the central themes found in The Prelude.

 It is not difficult for discerning critics to realize that the creative process — much as is the case in personal life — eventually arrives at the stubborn realization that human existence must appropriate objective reality. It is for this reason that Wordsworth’s reflection on the nature of the self eventually leads him to an encounter with spirit. The negation of the importance of spirit by postmodern writers and thinkers is an aberration of cultural and intellectual history that is more motivated by self-serving social/political ideology than an understanding of the role of spirit in human existence.   

Reflections on immortality rarely make an impression on us, especially when these are merely abstract. What purpose can such abstractions serve?  Wordsworth’s thought is profoundly metaphysical and existential, not abstract. His work never meanders far from the practical concerns of human beings as concrete persons. For instance, Wordsworth’s many depictions of being in open fields – in nature – heighten his awareness of his self: “On the ground I lay/ Passing through many thoughts, yet mainly such/As to myself pertained.” Besides remaining existential in scope, this aspect of Wordsworth’s thought has the added benefit of keeping him from falling prey to pedantry. By all accounts, Wordsworth’s reflection and articulation of the question of immortality remain personable.

Of tremendous importance to any accurate portrayal of Wordsworth’s contributions as a poet and thinker is his ability to tackle themes that make up the repertoire of perennial philosophy. Among the prominent themes of philosophia perennis et universalis, one finds: the passage of time, self-realization and autonomy in individuals, transcendence, the nature of objective reality, Being as logos, and differentiated spirits, as this is manifested in the cosmos. Conscientious observers of the history of philosophy will notice that the aforementioned themes have always made up the bulk of genuine philosophical reflection. At least as pertains to Wordsworth, any claim of these and other Wordsworthian themes as being merely part and parcel of the Romantic period, is simply naive.

Consider that the vast portion of The Prelude is a reflection about man in the cosmos, not just the world. Nature and the world serve as vehicles for man’s growth, and the pursuit of autonomy that spirit seeks. Wordsworth has a keen understanding of man’s dual nature as spirit and flesh. This insight commonly goes unnoticed by many critics who mostly concentrate on technical aspects of poetics. Wordsworth’s idea of man’s attainment of self-knowledge — auto-knosis — is encountered by man’s spirit as embodied flesh. That is, the cosmos, the world and human reality serve as the stage and setting for spirit to either flourish or become consumed by the banal aspects of day-to-day existence. For instance, this is the central theme of “The world is too Much with Us,” where Wordsworth writes, “The World is too Much with Us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Here the poet’s lament is man’s lack of perspicuity on matters of life and death in lieu of the fleeting nature of time.

We encounter the plight of spirit fending off objectification by the order of human reality and other people in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In Part V of that poem, Wordsworth offers a glimpse of his metaphysical thought in vivid, existential language:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended:
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Far from being a spiritual tabula rasa, Wordsworth’s conception of man as spirit is a being that carries with it from birth an essence that can only be fully manifested and ratified, as it were, in the arena that is the world. If birth serves as an anamnesis of our spiritual essence — our nature — as Wordsworth argues, it seems appropriate to ask: What is the role of the physical world in light of spirit? This is a theme that we encounter in many other thinkers, from Plato to Baltasar Gracian, Schopenhauer, and Calderon de la Barca. Calderon refers to life as a dream.

Much as some critics may be correct to argue that poets of the Romantic period shifted their focus from the objective to the subjective realm, Wordsworth cannot be considered one of these writers. This is paradoxical, though. The only way that the differentiated subject, that is, the autobiographical commentator of The Prelude can contemplate self-understanding and attain spiritual autonomy, is because the objective realm serves as the backdrop for spirit to possess itself. Early on, In Book I of The Prelude, we hear the narrator mention spirit for the first time:

My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem,
For holy services: great hopes were mine;
My own voice cheared me, and, far more, the mind’s
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listened, drawing from them both
A chearful confidence in things to come.

As a young boy, the narrator discovers the dualistic nature of man. Drawing from the advice of spirit and mind, the narrator draws careful conclusions as to what direction to embark on. Here we encounter echoes of Parmenides’ Fragments in ‘The Way of Truth.’ The challenge that the narrator accepts is a classic attribute of the spirit of philosophical reflection, whereby the seeker of truth allows himself to be guided by all of the tools at his disposal: spirit, reason and experience. Contrary to the opinion of historical reductionists, this search makes for a more complex approach to life, than, say, reducing all of human existence to one dimension or category.

We get a glimpse of this search by paying close attention to the joy that the narrator feels in setting out on his life-long search. The outcome of his search is anxiously anticipated, as it promises to enlighten the narrator about the objective nature of human reality. The narrator must seek the appropriate course of action, for a false start will set the course of his life on the wrong track. The intuition the narrator has of being a ‘chosen spirit’ in his trek for truth is proof that spirit is differentiated. This condition makes spirit responsible for penetrating the secrets that the order of the cosmos yields for people who cultivate self-knowledge. This is what Wordsworth means by nature. Nature — the structure and order of reality — is tantamount to being the order of objective reality, or in other terms, the order of things. It is important to stress that if the narrator is singled out “for holy services,” it is because this is a task that can culminate in the possession of objective understanding: differentiated subjects and objective reality unite in a marriage of objective truth, as the latter informs spirit.

However, a note of caution seems in order at this point regarding Wordsworth’s idea of spirit. While it may remain tempting for some critics and commentators to equate Wordsworth’s idea of spirit with Hegel’s diffused and abstract notion of spirit, there is at least one major difference between the two that must be pointed out. Hegel’s cosmic spirit, which is collective, and which comes to full possession of itself as absolute spirit through a dialectical process, leaves no room for spirit as the differentiated entity that one encounters in beings of flesh and bones. For Hegel, differentiated and autonomous beings are not capable of self-knowledge. In contrast to Hegel, spirit for Wordsworth is encountered by the differentiated subject, through what existentialist thinkers would later refer to as existential inquietude. The latter means personal longing. Unless spirit is understood as an originator and motivator of psychical processes, it makes little sense to talk about overcoming strife and difficulty in human existence. What overcoming can there be if there is not a self-aware being to register and resist the objectifying force that human reality exerts on us? Consider the importance of the following lines in reference to spirit:

Into a steady morning: if my mind,
Remembering the sweet promise of the past,
Would gladly grapple with some noble theme,
Vain is her wish; where’er she turns she finds
Impediments from day to day renewed.

Spirit finds impediments everywhere in the objective realm and its embodiment in the flesh. The theme of human existence as heroic is one that man has embraced for as long as we have had the capacity for self-knowledge; Gilgamesh demonstrated this in his search for immortality; Parmenides’ seeker of truth is confounded by the sheer difficulty and teasing nature of truth as revealing-unrevealing. In addition, existential thinkers have been known to become tormented by human-existence-as-resistance. Wordsworth enlightens us with this same line of reasoning:

The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times,
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
unmanageable thoughts.

Wordsworth’s treatment of spirit in The Prelude is in-depth. It is beyond the scope of this essay to comment on the many instances that spirit is mentioned in the work. The Prelude is a reflection on human life, as this is understood through the passage of time, and the latter’s relation to differentiated and existential existence. What marks The Prelude as an original and insightful work is what Wordsworth means by “nature” and “life.” He does not offer the standard dictionary definitions that we are accustomed to. The Romantic poets took nature to mean several things. Wordsworth utilizes variants of this word. Even when nature is taken to mean the natural processes of life on earth, Wordsworth manages to showcase man’s ability for existential reflection and self-awareness as being extra-natural. Self-reflection, as this phenomenological process, necessitates a greater understanding of human consciousness, separates man from the background of nature. The two most interesting renditions of nature that Wordsworth offers are nature as the order of the cosmos, and nature as an omnipotent force that does not leave anything to chance. It is only when one understands the extent and significance of the latter two meanings of nature that a proper understanding of spirit in Wordsworth’s work is possible. He reflects:

But I believe
That Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame
A favored Being, from his earliest dawn
of infancy doth open out the clouds,
As at the touch of lightning, seeking him
With gentlest visitation; not the less,
Though haply aiming at the self-same end,
Does it delight her sometimes to employ
Severer interventions, ministry
More palpable, and so she dealt with me.

Wordsworth explores the mystery of Being that informs nature in the act of “framing a favorite being,” from the time of its infancy, to becoming a recipient of the logos of human reality. This passage serves as a significant philosophical reflection that demonstrates Wordsworth’s turn from being a descriptive poet to his embrace of the lyrical magnitude that The Prelude attains to. Nature, when considered in any of her possible renditions, awakens Wordsworth’s narrator to the need for knowledge. However, not being one to settle for the kind of technical knowledge that science offers, the narrator turns the spark of knowledge that nature offers into wisdom and self-knowledge. So endearing and vital is the latter kind of knowledge that the narrator eventually comes to lament the loss of innocence. Nature acts as a guiding spirit that enables us to make coherent sense of the objective make-up of human reality. Wordsworth entertains the question: how much reality is man able to handle? Wordsworth addresses this question before Nietzsche. “Ode to Immortality” and “Tintern Abbey” explore this theme. Self-knowledge, Wordsworth argues, comes about through the province of spirit. This is comparable to the Christian idea of grace. In Wordsworth’s work, imagination leads to knowledge, and knowledge to joy. On the other hand, the English bard reminds the reader that no one has ever suffered a loss of innocence by embracing the scientific method.

Essence and Form in The Prelude

It is not difficult to make the case that The Prelude conceives differentiated human existence as an epic of man’s vitality. An epic must consider the passage of time, especially as this pertains to a given individual. I suggest that this aspect of Wordsworth’s thought is a boon to the history of modern philosophy. Book V — entitled “Books” — looks at the great gulf that exists between book knowledge and vital understanding. We ought not to forget that part of Wordsworth’s genius as a thinker and writer is his ability to articulate the nature and role of spirit in concrete human existence. The narrator’s descriptive dream of the Arab horseman is indicative of the nature of philosophical reflection, which is a tool in the service of differentiated existence. Wordsworth contrasts human existence as an epic – which is capable of self-understanding, with its opposite, pedantry and intellectual bloating. Wordsworth’s dream is akin to Coleridge’s seer, the ancient mariner and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. The horseman carries with him a book and a shell, symbols of science and poetry, respectively. The dream is an ominous one when man destroys himself due to a lack of self-knowledge. Book V of The Prelude explores the narrator’s coming to terms with his understanding of the transitory nature of biological life:

Hitherto,
In progress through this verse, my mind hath looked
Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven
As her prime Teacher, intercourse with man
Established by the sovereign Intellect,
Who through that bodily Image hath diffused
A soul divine which we participate,
A deathless spirit. Thou also, Man, hast wrought,
For commerce of thy nature with itself,
Things worthy of unconquerable life;
And yet we feel, we cannot chuse but feel,
That these must perish. Tremblings of the heart
It gives, to think that the immortal being
No more shall need such garments;

One would be remiss to consider Wordsworth’s philosophical findings in The Prelude as solely of subjective value, and the much cited and clichéd notion of the zeitgeist. Instead, Wordsworth’s genius enables him to realize that objective reality is discovered by autonomous, differentiated thinkers. He concedes this often comes as the result of tremendous personal sacrifice and suffering. Solitude and alienation in Wordsworth’s work are coupled with the potential power over the self that self-knowledge enables us to achieve. Consequently, the latter, Wordsworth tells us, is blissful joy.

The Prelude demonstrates that the reason subjects can know anything is because there exists objective knowledge in the first place. Stated in simple terms, the marriage of subjectivity and objective reality remains the stuff of which great artistic works are made. The biographical/existential growth that Wordsworth’s narrator undergoes, whether this is Wordsworth himself or not, is not important to the import of The Prelude. What the narrator uncovers in human reality is transcendent.

In Book I, the narrator tells the story of how he took a short trip in a shepherd’s boat, a skiff that delivered him to an enlightening and mysterious lake. This story is important, for the shepherd metaphor is a prominent one in Wordsworth’s thought. This metaphor is consistent with the solitary journey that all who embark in auto-knosis eventually encounter. Shepherds, by the very nature of their chosen work, must be independent thinkers. This is commensurate with the desire to remain objective, for the cost of self-delusion to life and limb in that line of work can be catastrophic. The shepherd must respect and embrace objective reality because his life may depend on his sincerity in remaining objective.

Moreover, the importance of that passage in Book I cannot be ignored as a lively metaphor or engaging poetic image. That passage is reminiscent of what one finds in Plato’s Cave allegory and the allegory of the Sun and the Good. The sensual images of the lake, mountains and moon that the narrator describes on his short-lived excursion rowing the skiff, are later transformed into mental forms. Wordsworth explains how this takes place:

And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men moved slowly through my mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams.

This is a significant passage that early in The Prelude helps to dispel what the author means by discovery: there can be no self-knowledge if we lack essential, transcendent knowledge. The narrator’s short trip on the lake serves as a rite of passage that the narrator must undergo to proceed to an existential form of self-knowledge. This form of knowledge comes to him after much reflection. Only then does the narrator ponder the essential nature and importance of first principles to human existence. Subsequently, the narrator realizes that understanding — wisdom — is a rite of passage that those who desire to “see” must be willing to undertake to attain knowledge of the sublime and transcendent. It is not a coincidence that writers and thinkers who we refer to as Romantics possess the kind of time-tested awe and wonder that has delivered many deserving thinkers to wisdom. The narrator adds:

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of Thought!
That giv’st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

In Book II Wordsworth suggests that form may be finite. He wonders, “And there is one, the wisest and the best/Of all mankind, who does not sometimes wish/For things which cannot be.”  Let us also consider the following lines: “In tranquil scenes, that universal power/And fitness in the latent qualities? And essences of things, by which the mind/Is moved by feelings of delight.”

The Prelude is a poetic odyssey that makes use of refined and thoughtful language that attempts to capture the nature of human existence. This is what great poetry accomplishes. Moreover, one of the characteristics that make The Prelude more than a romantic period work is Wordsworth’s profound grasp of the importance of qualitative phenomena. Because Wordsworth does not treat his seminal work as an essay in philosophy, many critics are quick to concentrate solely on the merits of the work as poetry. This is a mistake. One way that Wordsworth compensates for this is the sheer length of The Prelude. This is a very ambitious work by all accounts. With a length of 215 pages and 13 books, Wordsworth has ample time to contemplate themes that other writers articulate in essay form.   

Wordsworth embraces questions relating to essence and form in the same manner that the metaphysical poets did before him, such as T.S. Eliot, especially in his Four Quartets. Neither the metaphysical poets nor Eliot can be considered Romantic poets. Because The Prelude describes a personal lyrical odyssey, where the writer allows himself to be taken on a tour of life, as it were, his findings are those of a lifetime. Wordsworth’s laboratory is no less than the daily dealings that he undergoes with the world and nature. This necessitates a sense of realism that is not readily associated with a poetic temperament. As the narrator advances through the many stages of his life, we witness how he changes from a callow young man into an experienced and wise exponent of differentiated spirit, as the vehicle that propels human history. Nowhere in The Prelude do we witness the narrator’s understanding of human reality deteriorate into destructive cynicism or skepticism. It is primarily for this reason that Wordsworth turns away from what he considers the superficial world of the social-political. This takes place for him after the hatred, resentment and envy he witnessed during the French Revolution.

Wordsworth’s wisdom can be described — as wisdom must — the gift of perspicuity. Rather than opting for the dead-end that is social-political ideology, Wordsworth recognizes the human world as being a kind of spectacle. He discovers, as a young man, the hollow pride many people take in saving appearances. Wordsworth’s perspicuity enables him to realize that what most people value most is seeming and appearance, not the pursuit of truth. He writes in Book III, “I was the Dreamer, they the Dream; I roamed/Delighted, through the motley spectacle; Gowns grave or gaudy, Doctors, Students, Streets, Lamps, Gateways, flocks of Churches, Courts and Towers: A strange transformation for a mountain Youth.”

His awakening to the human world as a spectacle goes a long way in helping to explain Wordsworth’s idea of human reality and the extent to which most people care to embrace or reject it. The following lines make this clear:

At least, I more directly recognised
My powers and habits: let me dare to speak
A higher language, say that now I felt
The strength and consolation which were mine.
As if awakened, summoned, rouzed, constrained,
I looked for universal things; perused
The common countenance of earth and heaven;
And, turning the mind in upon itself,
Pored, watched, expected, listened; spread my thoughts
And spared them with a wider creeping; felt
Incumbences more awful, visitings
Of the unholder, of the tranquil Soul,
Which underneath all passion lives secure
A steadfast life.

One surprising unintended consequence of being a seeker of truth, Wordsworth informs us, is the unpleasant discovery that many who pass themselves off as intellectuals are in reality little more than posers. In Book III, he tells us what a devastating realization this is to a young thinker. This central aspect of The Prelude enables us to conceive Wordsworth’s world of appearance as an impediment to truth.

I will reiterate that Wordsworth’s work cannot be reduced to being a product of the Romantic period. The care he takes to dismantle man’s embrace of timely appearances helps to prove this. In addition, let us not confuse the words “historicity” and “historicism.” According to historicists, writers and thinkers are influenced by place and time. This merely stresses the obvious. On the other hand, historicism, which is the form of relativism that many reductionist critics have pegged on poets and thinkers from the Romantic era, does not stand up under scrutiny. Let us consider another fine example of Wordsworth’s thought that addresses this concern:

If these thoughts
Be a gratuitous emblazonry
That does not mock this recreant age, at least
Let folly and False-seeming, we might say,
Be free to affect whatever formal gait
Of moral or scholastic discipline
Shall raise them highest in their own esteem;
let them parade, among the schools at will;
But spare the House of God.

Wordsworth eventually came to the realization that abstractions have no place in man’s search for truth. Turned off by the excesses and murderous abstractions that he encountered in those who fanatically embraced the French Revolution, Wordsworth became reticent of the dangers of abstraction in curving our ability to live as autonomous beings who respect the limitations of the human condition.

The last three books of The Prelude do a marvelous job of embracing objective form and essence as being two of the tried-and-tested, fundamental principles of human reality. He says the following about the French Revolution:

This was a time when, all things tending fast
To depravation, the philosophy
That promised to abstract the hopes of man
out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth
For ever in a purer element
Found ready welcome.

Wordsworth contrasts the blind frenzy that is cast on youth and understanding of people who never progress beyond lazy perception with the delight that people who come to possess self-knowledge, feel. He adds:

But, speaking more in charity, the dream
Was flattering to the young ingenuous mind
Pleased with extremes, and not the least with that
Which makes the human Reason’s naked self
The object of its fervour. What delight!
How glorious! in self-knowledge and self-rule,
To look through all the frailties of the world.

Wordsworth captures form and essence by contrasting these with the fleeting order of time. The bard treats lived time as an instance, a moving image of eternity as sub specie aeternitatis. This is why he shows great disregard for the “pompous names/Of power and action,” which distract man from contemplation of the sublime. It is the task of individuals who have been touched by a divine vocation to uncover the realm of form and essence hidden beneath the veneer of material reality. Wordsworth is adamant in this regard. He reminds us of the importance of vocation in uncovering form and essence. In Book XIII, he writes:

They need not extraordinary calls
To rouze them, in a world of of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
But quickened, roused, and made thereby more fit
To hold communion with the invisible world.
Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That can be known is theirs, the consciousness
Of whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image, and through every thought,
And all impressions; hence religion, faith,
And endless occupation for the soul
Whether discursive or intuitive.

The Prelude comes to an end much as it begins. The illumination that awe and wonder — the essential form of vocation that some individuals care to cultivate — uncovers in everyday doings in a loud and dusty world that is always too much with us.

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