em so far back, can feel within them any reflex
of that eager excitement, with which the news of battles fought and won,
or mail-coach copies of some new work of Scott, or Byron, or the
_Edinburgh Review_, were looked for and received in those already old
days. [J] We need not remind the readers of the _Excursion_, that when
Wordsworth was enabled, by the generous enthusiasm of Raisley Calvert,
to retire with a slender independence to his native mountains, there to
devote himself exclusively to his art, his first step was to review and
record in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he
was acquainted with them. This was at once an exercise in versification,
and a test of the kind of poetry for which he was by temperament fitted.
The result was a determination to compose a philosophical poem,
containing views of man, of nature, and of society. This ambitious
conception has been doomed to share the fate of so many other colossal
undertakings. Of the three parts of his _Recluse_, thus planned, only
the second (the _Excursion_, published in 1814) has been completed. Of
the other two there exists only the first book of the first, and the
plan of the third. The _Recluse_ will remain in fragmentary greatness, a
poetical Cathedral of Cologne.

Matters standing thus, it has not been without a melancholy sense of the
uncertainty of human projects, and of the contrast between the sanguine
enterprise and its silent evaporation (so often the "history of an
individual mind"), that we have perused this _Prelude_ which no
completed strain was destined to follow. Yet in the poem itself there is
nothing to inspire depression. It is animated throughout with the
hopeful confidence in the poet's own powers, so natural to the time of
life at which it was composed; it evinces a power and soar of
imagination unsurpassed in any of his writings; and its images and
incidents have a freshness and distinctness which they not seldom lost,
when they came to be elaborated, as many of them were, in his minor
poems of a later date.

The _Prelude_, as the title page indicates, is a poetical autobiography,
commencing with the earliest reminiscences of the author, and continued
to the time at which it was composed. We are told that it was begun in
1799 and completed in 1805. It consists of fourteen books. Two are
devoted to the infancy and schooltime of the poet; four to the period of
his University life; two to a brief residence in