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the poem, as he justifies his support for the revolutionaries and describes his subsequent fall from graceand his realisation of the hubris of his earlier claims. Having relied too heavily on Nature’s guidance,he recognised that he had failed to develop his own sense of identity. His over-enthusiastic support forthe French revolutionary cause had led him to pursue a fanatical course of action that led to a positionof extreme isolation, and an inevitable mental collapse. As he recovered from this period of crisis hepursued a course of study that enabled him to identify answers to his political or ‘moral questions’through an enquiry based on reason not emotion. Unfortunately his study of Godwin’s philosophyonly led him into further error, and he retired to Racedown where, I argue, his reading in Cicero’sphilosophical works acted as a ‘cure’ for his state of mind, by providing answers to his ‘moralquestions’. In Tusculan Disputations Cicero explicitly defines ‘philosophy’ as a cure for the sick mind.At Racedown Wordsworth developed the capacity to think for himself, while pursuing avirtuous life in which he attempted to distinguish true from false reason. He was then able to reestablisha connection with Nature, as a wise man, whose mind embodied natural wisdom, and couldagain become one with Nature – but this time as a fully conscious, mature adult – a ‘man’ whoseImagination was identified with ‘Highest Reason’. The plot of The Prelude explains thosecircumstances to Coleridge as the argument of the poem commends the Stoic principles thatWordsworth had followed in order to attain to the state of mind celebrated at the end of the poem as a‘Prophet of Nature’ speaking ‘A lasting inspiration, sanctified / By reason and by truth.’ Thisreasoned state of mind bears no relationship to any conception of ‘poetic’ or ‘prophetic election’. It hasnothing in common with the juvenile state of mind described in the ‘glad preamble’ to the poem. As a‘chosen son’ Wordsworth was incapable of ‘building up a Work that should endure’. The poet relianton inspiration is not able to act consciously, and is therefore not a ‘wise man’, someone in whom thedivine and the human are united. The Stoic, however, has become conscious of the power of his ownmind through his dedication to the ‘philosophical life’ – the pursuit of virtue, following Socraticprinciples. Through such a pursuit it is possible to become conscious of the divinity in the mind itself,rather than merely being ‘possessed’ by some divine ‘influx’ (Prelude XII 308). In his later ‘manly’reappraisal of the ‘mystical’ experiences of his later youth, Wordsworth re-defines such experiences as‘vicious’ rather than ‘virtuous’. Having originally believed himself to be favoured as a ‘chosen son’, helater recognised that such vatic experiences limited, rather than enlarged, his consciousness. He wasthen able to put a different light on the experiences of his youth, and to realise that the divine guidancethat Nature had provided to one of her favoured sons had become a problem as he approachedmanhood. It was only after the ‘crisis of that strong disease’ (Prelude 1850: XI 306), that he was thenable to develop his own mental capacity, so that he might consciously attain to a state of divine wisdom– to an understanding, hopefully, of the ‘mind of man…in beauty exalted, as it is itself / Of substanceand of fabric more divine’ (XIII 451-2).My justification for the assertions I make here is provided in more detail in Part II, but sincemy reading of The Prelude in Chapter 5 is based on appreciating Wordsworth’s stoic frame of mind, Ineed to present them as working hypotheses here. I propose that Wordsworth’s original understandingof Stoic thought originated in his reading of Cicero at Racedown, and that ‘Lines Written Above82