The Browsing Victorian Reader

Abstract

John Stuart Mill famously writes in his Autobiography (1873) that reading William Wordsworth's poetry brought him relief when he was depressed. Exhausted by the habit of analysis instilled in him through his father's rigorous educational program, Mill recalls that the state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time. an important event in my life (137, 146; ch. 5). He describes how he took up the collection of [Wordsworth's] poems from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it, but fortuitously found the precise thing for [his] mental wants at that particular juncture, the delightful states of feeling the poems conjure in their renderings of beauty.