Wordsworth the Revisionary

[...]compare that opening with that of the corresponding passage in 1799: [...]the 1799 version contains more lines that again particularize these influences: What is certainly clear is that the prime preoccupation of the 1799 Prelude is with the relationship between the spirit of Nature and the growth of a favoured being, so that from the first lines, in which he speaks of "the calm / Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves" the dual motif of "the growth of mental power / And love of Nature's works" becomes steadily stronger, producing in the second book more examples of "That spirit of religious love in which/ I walked with Nature" until he can record The lines quoted earlier end similarly with a stress on the exaltation that is at work: Once started on this track, Wordsworth felt the urge to extend his idea further: on the one hand, he cut out the reference to his own experience as authority for what he was saying, while, on the other, he transformed the image of the child transmitting the light of its Being - an image which he perhaps distrusted in its simple form - into a more extended and complex one whereby the child becomes likened to the moon that had revealed itself over Snowdon: Thou best Philosopher who yet does keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, That deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind . . [...]some of these ideas, such as the travelling persona, survived into later collections but he also combined the poet and the introspective man by producing large sections entitled "Poems based on the Affections," "Poems of the Fancy," and "Poems of the Imagination."