ed in MS. an unfinished poem of very high
pretensions, and extraordinary magnitude, from the pen of the late--is
he to be the last?--poet-laureate of Britain. At the tidings, Lord
Jeffrey made himself very merry, and sought for a powerful calculus to
compute the supposed magnitude of the poem. De Quincey, on the other
hand, had read it, and both in his writings and conversation, was in the
habit of alluding to, quoting, and panegyrizing it as more than equal to
Wordsworth's other achievements. All of it that is publishable, or shall
ever be published, now lies before us; and we approach it with
curiously-mingled emotions--mingled, because although a fragment, it is
so vast, and in parts so finished, and because it may be regarded as at
once an early production of his genius, and its latest legacy to the
world. It seems a large fossil relic--imperfect and magnificent--newly
dug up, and with the fresh earth and the old dim subsoil meeting and
mingling around it.

The "Prelude" is the first _regular versified_ autobiography we remember
in our language. Passages, indeed, and parts of the lives of celebrated
men, have been at times represented in verse, but in general a vail of
fiction has been dropped over the real facts, as in the case of Don
Juan; and in all the revelation made has resembled rather an escapade or
a partial confession than a systematic and slowly-consolidated life. The
mere circumstances, too, of life have been more regarded than the inner
current of life itself. We class the 'Prelude' at once with Sartor
Resartus--although the latter wants the poetic _form_--as the two most
interesting and faithful records of the individual experience of men of
genius which exist.

And yet, how different the two men, and the two sets of experience.
Sartor resembles the unfilled and yawning crescent moon, Wordsworth the
rounded harvest orb: Sartor's cry is, "Give, give!" Wordsworth's "I have
found it, I have found it!" Sartor can not, amid a universe of work,
find a task fit for him to do, and yet can much less be utterly idle;
while to Wordsworth, basking in the sun, or loitering near an evening
stream, is sufficient and satisfactory work. To Sartor, Nature is a
divine tormentor--her works at once inspire and agonize him; Wordsworth
loves her with the passion of a perpetual honeymoon. Both are intensely
self-conscious; but Sartor's is the consciousness of disease,
Wordsworth's of high health standing before a mirror. Bot