Wordsworth, however, comes to understand such vision as inhuman. While excess tends to de-individuate being and thus to dissolve all being into one being, this very de-individuation is the possibility of vision-seeing into the life of things. The Prelude ends, after all, with a discussion of friendship, of Wordsworth's relationship to Dorothy and Coleridge. The 1805 Prelude moves from a depiction of Wordsworth as a "chosen" being to Wordsworth as a social being. This shift resituates the relationship of systems of power to the self. Such an understanding is also a movement, for Wordsworth realizes his own role not as child, but as parent in the 1805 Prelude. From the 1799 Prelude to the 1805 Prelude, Wordsworth shifts the basis of his power from nature to human community. Excess, that "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," gives rise to the imagination in The Prelude. In this case, excess serves to mediate between the being of the self and the being of the world. Excess is a power beyond that of a given system such as nature or human community.
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