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Here the reader will remember that Wordsworth’s early childhood was ‘fostered alike bybeauty and by fear’, and that ‘fear’, as an experience of the sublime, also contains a feeling of awe-ful‘joy’. Wordsworth describes his youthful mind negotiating a course influenced by these ‘twoprinciples of joy’, unable yet to distinguish the virtues and vices of either. It is only later, as a man,looking back over his life that he is able to make ‘moral’ judgements about the course of his life as hereviews it with an adult mind. After a period of youth, when nature had been ‘all in all’ it was onlyafter ‘twenty three summers’ had passed, (revised to twenty two in the 1850 text), that man becamethe central focus of his affections. This would suggest the end of 1792 when he engaged in theactivities of the revolutionaries in France; and it is this period that is the focus of the next two Booksof The Prelude.Books IX and X form something of a historical digression, a fall into history and a record of‘Man’s unhappiness and guilt’, after which Wordsworth returns, wistfully, to seek some hope innature, having suffered: ‘utter loss of hope itself / And things to hope for!’ in the world of men. In hisdejection Wordsworth rallies his thoughts: ‘Not with these began / Our song, and not with these oursong must end’ (XI 1; 6-8). It seems, at first, that he was recommending a return to the state of mindof the ‘glad preamble’ with which the poem began, as he addresses the breezes, brooks and groves –the places of inspiration for the dreaming poet. He finds that Nature still offers her beauties and, ‘inNature still / Glorying’, he finds ‘a counterpoise in her’ (XI 32-3). But his passion for her, ‘fervent asit was / Had suffered change’. He finds himself no longer able to lose himself in nature and have ‘amusic and a voice / Harmonious as [her] own’ (XI 20-1). A necessary separation from nature isacknowledged, one that has the virtue of enabling him to gain a new appreciation of nature’soperations, having been able to distance himself from the ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’ of hisearlier involvement. At the beginning of Book XII the ‘fear’ and ‘beauty’ of Nature are re-describedas a balance between pathos and ethos, a description set out in a carefully composed 14 line ‘sonnet’in which the power of individual genius is described as echoing that of Nature:From nature doth emotion come, and moodsOf calmness equally are Nature’s gift:This is her glory; these two attributesAre sister horns that constitute her strength;This twofold influence is the sun and showerOf all her bounties, both in originAnd end alike benignant. Hence it is,That Genius, which exists by interchangeOf peace and excitation, finds in herHis best and purest friend; from her receivesThat energy by which he seeks the truth,Is roused, aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves,From her that happy stillness of the mindWhich fits him to receive it when unsought. (XII 1-14)The dynamic that exists between the pathos of emotional states of mind and the ethos ofcivilised, moods of calm, is not such that one can ever replace or dominate the other. As ‘sister horns’,they construct the horns of a dilemma that can only be resolved by going through them. Both sun and128