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more progressive and ‘enlightened’ teachings of Paley were the fashion. 7 Coleridge shows that he hasa general knowledge of Cicero’s philosophical works in his discussions of philosophy, and it wouldseem that he had been engaged in discussion with Wordsworth about Stoic philosophy by 1802,something I discuss below; but he was not sympathetic to Stoicism. 8II. A Sense SublimeIt is a curious fact of canonical Wordsworth studies, that the strong Stoic sentimentsexpressed in ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ have been largely ignored by Romantic criticism,even though the lines in the central section of the poem that describe Wordsworth’s Stoic faith areoften cited by writers on Stoicism for the transparency of the Stoic concepts they express. The ‘poemon the Wye’ has often been read as evidence of Wordsworth’s pantheism – the idea that everything isGod, and God is everything, and Coleridge is seen to have provided him with his concepts. Butpantheism is too loose a term to describe Wordsworth’s actual belief in nature, which is perhaps betterdescribed as panentheism: God is in everything and everything is in God. 9 I define Wordsworth’sspecific relationship to ‘Nature’ at this time, as that of a Stoic philosopher, a novitiate Stoic sage,rather than as a ‘son of Rousseau’, or as a worshipper of ‘rocks and stones and trees’, or as a followerof Burke and ‘Burkean’ notions of ‘second nature’. In remaining focussed on the ‘natural man’ I donot deny the ‘spiritual’ in man, but I understand the pneuma, as Wordsworth did - as an integral partof the natural world. This is a ‘one life’ theory that Wordsworth discovered in Stoic philosophy, ratherthan in his discussions with Coleridge. Here I differ from established opinion that, whileacknowledging Wordsworth’s adoption of a Stoic attitude of mind around 1804, does not generallyrecognise his knowledge of early Stoic philosophy in the late 1790s.‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during atour, July 13 1798’ was composed some four months after Ms B of ‘The Ruined Cottage’. It presents adeclaration of faith in Nature, as well as a declaration of love for Humanity and Dorothy. The centralsection that acknowledges the change in Wordsworth’s ethos, signals a transition from an earlier stateof mind as an enthusiast of nature, addicted to the ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’ found in ‘nature’which, at that earlier time, was considered to be ‘all in all’. In order to satisfy his ‘appetite’ for herpleasures then, Wordsworth would follow ‘Wherever nature led’. But now, ‘That time is past’, and theloss of those pleasures has been replaced by ‘Abundant recompense’. This compensation is describedin a carefully constructed enthymematic ‘argument’ [1] ‘For I have learned /To look on nature, not as7 Robert Southey, Thomas De Quincey and John Wilson had all studied at Oxford. Southey became an earlyconvert to Stoic thought; possibly this contributed to his intolerance of Coleridge’s lack of will. He found thework of Epictetus, in particular, his guide to stoicism.8 Coleridge had made a point of attacking Godwin - whom he demonised for his Stoic attitude of mind - at theend of his third ‘Lecture on Revealed Religion’ in Bristol in 1795. Coleridge’s rhetoric implies Godwin’sphilosophy to be the work of Satan, and opposes it in the name of Christ.9 For an important study of Coleridge’s concerns with pantheism, in a book that might be read as supplementingmy representation of Wordsworth’s reasoning by providing a better understanding of Coleridge’s concerns,see Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason.75