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Athwart imagination’s vivid eye;Or, by the vocal woods and waters lulledAnd lost in lonely musing, in a dreamConfused of careless solitude where mixTen thousand wandering images of things,Soothe every gust of passion into peace-All but the swellings of the softened heart,That waken, not disturb, the tranquil mind. (Spring 455-466) 33Thomson offers different possibilities to the prospective dreamer: a mediated reverie using Virgil as aguide, or unmediated ones, in which the mind either catches for itself the visual memories collectedduring the morning’s walk, or uses sound ‘images,’ the voices of nature, to lull the mind into its ‘wisepassivity.’ In the opening lines of The Prelude, Wordsworth relates how after an initial, unusual, andbrief experience of ‘dithyrambic fervour’ – a ‘rant’ that had failed to produce poetry – he walked onand found a grove where he could, instead, lie down and recollect in tranquillity.And in the sheltered grove where I was couchedA perfect stillness. On the ground I layPassing through many thoughts, yet mainly suchAs to myself pertained.......Thus long I layCheered by the genial pillow of the earthBeneath my head, soothed by the sense of touchFrom the warm ground, that balanced me, else lostEntirely, seeing nought, nought hearing..... (I. 78-81; 87-91)The contrast between the impassioned state of mind that might produce a vatic utterance, and themilder state of blissful reverie is intended as a formal comparison, a comparatio that sets outsomething of the matter of the case he will be presenting to Coleridge about ‘imagination’. Later, indescribing the dream of the Arab in Book V, Wordsworth models the first of Thomson’s suggestionsin the passage from Spring, though the ‘classic page’ is that of a Spanish noble, Cervantes, not ‘theMantuan swain’. The dream occurs when the narrator, sitting in a rocky cave by the sea falls asleepafter reading from Cervantes’ Don Quixote one drowsy summer noon. 34In his youth, Wordsworth had drawn heavily on Thomson for descriptions of nature, and onhis representations of a sense of the universal spirit in things that links the human heart with nature.Thomson was the great poet of nature in the mid eighteenth-century, and in 1794, while living atWindy Brow, Wordsworth made a number of revisions to An Evening Walk in which Thomson’sinfluence is very evident. One passage written then, that has captured the attention of later criticsseems to owe much to Thomson.A heart that vibrates evermore, awakeTo feeling for all forms that Life can take,That wider still its sympathy extendsAnd sees not any line where being ends;33 All references are to The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, Ed J. Logie Robertson.34 The same situation is presented in ‘Lines Left upon a seat in a Yew-tree’ where the sound of the waveslapping the shore lulls the mind of the occupant of that particular ‘seat’ into a state of ‘vacancy’.235