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A simple produce of the common day.These sentiments are repeated in Book X of The Prelude in the passage beginning ‘Oh! pleasantexercise of hope and joy’ which concludes:Not in Utopia - subterraneous fields, -Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!But in the very world which is the worldOf all of us, - the place in which, in the end,We find our happiness, or not at all! (X 690-728) 24Having already described the earth as ‘most beautiful’, the very final lines of The Prelude amplify thatdescription by suggesting that ‘the mind of man’ is even more beautiful, and Wordsworth’s claims canbe seen to echo Cato’s praise of the beautiful mind. At the conclusion of The Prelude Wordsworthdescribes his (and hopefully Coleridge’s) task, as ‘Prophets of Nature’, to teach and instruct:how the mind of man becomesA thousand times more beautiful than the earthOn which he dwells, above this frame of things(Which, ‘mid all revolutions in the hopesAnd fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)In beauty exalted, as it is itselfOf substance and of fabric more divine. 25It would appear, at first, that Wordsworth is making concessions to Coleridge’s idealism here insuggesting that the mind of man is so much more beautiful than the beauties of the earth, and that itcould be described as dwelling in some transcendent, utopian, placeless place, ‘above this frame ofthings’. But this statement is still a comparison of degree, not one of difference in kind. And tomaintain that the mind ‘is itself / Of substance and of fabric more divine’ is to assert that the mind ofman is, in itself, divine. Wordsworth does not conceive of the mind requiring help from somehypothetical transcendent deity. He has already stressed this point in describing the joint labours ofintellectual love and imagination. In order to recognise and realise its highest form of identity, as thatof a truly wise being, capable of expressing ‘reason in her most exalted mood’, the ‘mind of man’must draw on both the ‘sublime’ resources of Nature and the ‘beauties’ of human nature through anact of individual (Stoic) will:Here must thou be, O Man!Strength to thyself – no helper hast thou here;Here keepest thou thy individual state:24 Published in The Friend, October 1809 as ‘The French Revolution: As it appeared to an enthusiast at itscommencement’. Although many of Wordsworth’s political ideals as an enthusiast in 1792 are later seen asunrealistic, he is happy to repeat, and presumably still believes in, the sentiments expressed in the last lines ofThe Prelude, and in the lines published as a ‘Prospectus to The Recluse’.25 Jonathan Wordsworth glosses this passage with a reference to Wordsworth describing the powers of ‘thecreative and responsive imagination’ that can ‘perceive the existence of God’. NP 482 Other critics mightwell turn to German Romantic ideals about ‘Beauty’ exemplified, for instance in Schiller’s work. But myargument here denies this ‘Romantic’ connection. Wordsworth, as Dockhorn stressed, was working out of thepast – he was not in the vanguard of those defining a new Romantic future.289