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him greater persuasive power over the minds of his readers, and a new means of engaging in‘politics’. 32‘The Ruined Cottage’ opens with a description of a late morning scene on an oppressively hotday in summer. The lines that set the scene are taken from An Evening Walk (lines 53-56) and eightlines from revisions to that poem written in 1794 at Windy Brow. What is significant about theselines is the fact that they strongly echo a passage from James Thomson’s ‘Summer’ in The Seasonswhich, as Graver observed, is in turn based on a passage in Virgil’s Georgics III. The Seasons hadbeen a major influence on Wordsworth in his youth, and he records reciting passages from it on hisearly morning walks by Esthwaite Water before school. In addition to learning from Thomson’spoetic practice, he would have also been influenced by the republican sympathies which inform TheSeasons, and which were more explicitly represented in Thomson’s Liberty. Thomson might beconsidered Wordsworth’s first teacher of ‘natural’ republican political philosophy, and an influencehe was able to draw on when asked about his politics by the royalist officers in Orléans in 1792.Although the opening lines of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ are taken directly from Thomson, myreading here suggests that the events portrayed in Wordsworth’s poem represent a rejection of theinfluence of his strong precursor. In ‘The Ruined Cottage’ Wordsworth declares his independencefrom Thomson’s influence, stressing his own Stoic perspective and denigrating Thomson’s, which heappears to have associated with an Epicurean retreat from the affairs of the world. This wassomething Wordsworth rejected, seeing his retirement to Racedown and his turn to study as a meansto an end – he did not see himself as a detached spectator unconcerned with the world of humanaffairs. It was important to him that he still be considered a man of action rather than an Epicurean‘dreamer’, and it was also important that he distance himself from superstition, as he adopted ‘thephilosophic mind’ idealised by Cicero’s example. In composing ‘The Ruined Cottage’ Wordsworthdoes a number of remarkable things as he paves the way toward defining the ethos that he was todefine for himself, and his ideal poet by 1802. One of those things was to differentiate his own‘natural’ poetic voice from that of Thomson’s.One of Thomson’s central figures in his representations of the beatus vir is ‘the dreamingpoet’ who, in imitation of his Italian counterpart, reclines under the shade of a tree and indulges inreverie. In Spring, Thomson advises his reader to ‘lie reclined beneath yon spreading ash’ and whilemusing on Virgil, amuse himself with his own fancies:There let the classic page thy fancy leadThrough rural scenes, such as the Mantuan swainPaints in the matchless harmony of song;Or catch thyself the landscape, gliding swift32 Such indirect representation of important topics was also a characteristic of the georgic form, as Addison hadearlier noted in commenting on Virgil’s art:he loves to suggest a Truth indirectly, and without giving us a full and open view of it: To let us seejust so much as will naturally lead the Imagination into all the parts that lie conceal’d. This iswonderfully diverting to the Understanding, thus to receive a Precept, that enters as it were through aBy-way, and to apprehend an Idea that draws a whole train after it: For here the Mind, which is alwaysdelighted in its own Discoveries, only takes the hint from the Poet, and seems to work out the rest bythe strength of her own faculties. (Essay on the Georgics 147-8)234