This paper attempts to verify and bolster Duncan Wu's assertion that "Grief is the making of Wordsworth." "Grief," according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, is "intense sorrow, especially caused by someone's death." Yet, the opposite of "love" is generally considered to be "hatred." Despite this, Wordsworth used "hatred" only once throughout his philosophical and autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1805). As we can see from the powerful lines located near the end of that masterwork, "At-tempered to the sorrow of the earth-/Yet centering all in love" (Book 13.383-4), it is clearly not "hatred" that stands in opposition to "love" for Wordsworth, but instead "sorrow." His sorrow is most vividly depicted in the "Waiting for the Horses" episode in The Prelude (I examine the three published versions: 1799, 1805, 1850). The episode is about a memory of waiting for horses to take Wordsworth and his brothers home from school for the Christmas holiday and of their father's death a few days after their arrival home. It seems that the episode derives its origin from "The Vale of Esthwaite" (1787), which was written in Wordsworth's youth. I examine Wordsworth's process of growing to intellectual maturity by comparing descriptive expressions situated in the episode in "The Vale of Esthwaite" and those in The Prelude. The paper concludes that, for Wordsworth, tragic events, such as his father's early death when Wordsworth was in his teens, in fact equipped the poet with a power of transformation: the place where he sank into a state of unbearable sorrow in "The Vale" has turned into one where he recovered his strength and spirits in The Prelude.

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