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yet to hear ‘the still sad music of humanity’ heard by those who have learnt ‘to look on nature’ withan educated mind. In a deliberate turn to Coleridge, he marks a turning point in his early life, as hereviews his experiences during his Cambridge years from the vantage point of his matureconsciousness. In addressing Coleridge he tells him:And here, O friend! I have retraced my lifeUp to an eminence, and told a taleOf matters which not falsely I may callThe glory of my youth. Of genius, power,Creation and divinity itselfI have been speaking for my theme has beenWhat passed within me. Not of outward thingsDone visibly for other minds, words, signs,Symbols or actions but of my own heartHave I been speaking, and my youthful mind. (III 168-177, my italics).What Wordsworth stresses here is the self-centredness, the solipsistic, narcissistic nature ofthis existence. Such was the ‘glory’ of his youth, and he had felt himself filled with the glory of thedivinity. But, as the narrative of the poem goes on to relate, such a state of enthusiasm is vicious, andcan lead to claims of prophetic insight that are pure folly and self-delusion. While it is accepted thatyouth might relish such experience, it is no state of mind for a mature man, who must develop hisown capacity to reason and reflect, in order to become wise, and fully conscious of the potentialdivinity of his own mind and its relationship to humankind. At this point in the narrative of ThePrelude, Wordsworth figures himself descending into earthly life from his earlier, more divine,vantage point – just as the Pedlar had done. But he also alludes to the more epic pretensions of hisnarrative in The Prelude, which can be seen to echo the descent of Dante in his Divine Comedy, orAdam in Paradise Lost:Enough: for now into a populous plainWe must descend. A Traveller I am,And all my tale is of myself; even soSo be it ( III 195-198)And with this ‘Amen’, he also requests that Coleridge – ‘Who in my thoughts art ever by my side’might ‘Uphold, as heretofore, my fainting steps’ (III 201), just as Dante had asked of Virgil, in theDivine Comedy.Wordsworth noted that his residence at Cambridge served as something of a halfway house,one situated between the divine world of his youth and the world of ‘man’. During this period of hislife he describes himself, like the Pedlar, with a foot in both worlds – divine and human. In Book IV,he describes himself being able to return (regress) to the ‘divine’ world and the narcissistic states ofconsciousness of his youth during his first long vacation. It is significant, however, that his encounterwith the discharged soldier at the end of the book interrupts his deliberately sought state of reverie,and requires him to attend to the needs of a ‘suffering’ man, whose experience of the world has beenone of war. The ‘dreaming man’ is again confronted and admonished’ by ‘historical man’. This272