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‘philosophical’ passage that makes up a large part of the reconciling addendum to ‘The RuinedCottage’.I do not attempt to provide a more detailed reading of the concluding addendum here, since itwould commit me to extending this study to include comment on The Excursion. The passage laterformed a substantial part of the Wanderer’s reply to the Solitary in Book IV of The Excursion,‘Despondency Corrected’, and should be read in that context. However, several lines of theconcluding addendum will be found to have originated in the passages from the Alfoxden andChristabel Notebooks, and a more detailed study of those notebooks will reveal the extent to whichleading ideas expressed later in The Excursion originated in work done in 1798-9. Brieflysummarised, the passage (which Stephen Gill described as the most important lines Wordsworth everwrote), relates how humans have to develop the right relationship with Nature, developing their ownintellectual capacities in partnership with Nature by careful observation and action: ‘Thus disciplined/ All things shall live in us and we shall live / In all things that surround us’ (PW V 402 ll 78-80). Andas this capacity is enhanced it ultimately produces a state of wisdom which ensures that humans ‘shallmove / From strict necessity along the path / Of order and of good’ (ll 93-95). Wordsworth’s, and theWanderer’s, understanding of ‘necessity’ here is fundamentally Stoic and a reading of Book III ofCicero’s De Finibus (On Moral Ends) can supply statements about Stoic ethics that are very similarin sentiment to those voiced by the Pedlar.The original ‘bleak’ ending of Ms B was in fact the first part of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ to bewritten, and Wordsworth developed the story from an initial exercise in describing the despair of ahalf-crazed, distressed, and abandoned woman rooted to her ‘wretched spot’. It is likely that he tookas his starting point a passage that he found in Southey’s Joan of Arc, and that he then developed ascenario to explain her situation. 21The tale of Margaret’s demise provides the pathos forWordsworth’s narrative, and in casting the Pedlar as the narrator of her story, he developed analternative focus to that of her suffering. In developing the Pedlar’s specific ethos, Wordsworthintended that he would offer some form of consolation to Margaret in her distress. In order for him toprovide that consolation, he needed to have a philosophy that might offer ‘hope’ – which is theopposite of ‘despair’. The Latin words spes and desperare provide a better sense of the relationshipbetween the two terms. And as has been noted, ‘hope’ is indeed what the Pedlar did offer Margaret.Wordsworth’s use of the term ‘hope’ throughout the poem plays on this fundamental opposition,something clear to the mind of a reader of Latin, whose education had trained him to think accordingto such distinctions. In the poem, Wordsworth continued to draw on Cicero’s description of theeconomics of the emotions in the Tusculans, as he defined the attitude portrayed by the Pedlar. But he21At her cottage doorThe wretched one shall sit, and with dim eyeGaze o’er the plain whereon his parting stepsHer last look hung. Nor ever shall she knowHer husband dead, but tortur’d with vain hopeGaze on- then heart-sick turn to the poor babeAnd weep him fatherless. (Book 7. 325- 31)E.P. Thomson suggested Southey’s work as a source in ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, TheRomantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, pp. 33-74.263