In the middle of Book XIV, the last book of The Prelude, Wordsworth indicates, rather belatedly, that the poem has two themes:
Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectual Love.
My purpose in this paper is to examine this secondary theme of The Prelude. It is a theme that, under the name of benevolence, has been treated fairly adequately without reference to The Prelude by George W. Meyer in Wordsworth's Formative Years (1943). But unless I am seriously mistaken, no one has recognized, first, the content Wordsworth gives to the term or, second, the place he gives to the theme in the structure of The Prelude.