No doubt, through “The Prelude,” and through all Wordsworth’s poetry contemporary with it, that is, all his poetry composed before the age of thirty-five, there runs a vein of Optimism. But a man’s views of life are not complete at that age. Though he never expressly recanted any of the views expressed in “The Prelude,” yet he added to them new elements when time and grief showed him other sides of life. Hitherto, human sorrow had been to him but a “still sad music” far away. But when, in 1805, Nature, with her night and tempest, drove his favorite brother’s ship on the Shambles of Portland Head, and wrecked the life he greatly loved, then he learned that she was not always serene, but could be stern and cruel. Then sorrow came home to him, and entered into his inmost soul. In that bereavement we find him writing—“Why have we sympathies that make the best of us afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be his notion and rule, if everything were to end here? Would it not be blasphemous to say that ... we have more of love in our nature than He has? The thought is monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition of another and a better world, I do not see.” This is not the language of a pantheist, as he has been often called, nor of an optimist, one blind to the dark side of the world, as his poetry would sometimes make us fancy him. From that time on, the sights and sounds of Nature took to Wordsworth a soberer hue, a more solemn tone. The change of mood is grandly expressed in the “Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle,” where he says that he now could look no more on “A smiling sea, and be what I have been.” Yet he gives way to no weak or selfish lamentation, but sets himself to draw from the sorrow fortitude for himself, sympathy and tenderness for others:— “Then welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne; Such sights, or worse, as are before me here;— Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”