stic
suffering in "The Excursion." In the story of Margaret, containing, we
believe, more than four hundred lines--a tolerably long poem in
itself--though the whole and entire state of a poor deserted wife and
mother's heart, for year after year of "hope deferred, that maketh the
heart sick," is described, or rather dissected, with an almost cruel
anatomy--not one quivering fibre being left unexposed--all the
fluctuating, and finally all the constant agitations laid bare and naked
that carried her at last lingeringly to the grave--there is not--except
one or two weak lines, that seem to have been afterwards purposely
dropped in--one single syllable about Religion. Was Margaret a
Christian?--Let the answer be yes--as good a Christian as ever kneeled
in the small mountain chapel, in whose churchyard her body now waits for
the resurrection. If she was--then the picture painted of her and her
agonies, is a libel not only on her character, but on the character of
all other poor Christian women in this Christian land. Placed as she
was, for so many years, in the clutches of so many passions--she surely
must have turned sometimes--ay, often, and often, and often, else had
she sooner left the clay--towards her Lord and Saviour. But of such
"comfort let no man speak," seems to have been the principle of Mr
Wordsworth; and the consequence is, that this, perhaps the most
elaborate picture he ever painted of any conflict within any one human
heart, is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious
mind--_that_ being wanting without which the entire representation is
vitiated, and necessarily false to nature--to virtue--to resignation--to
life--and to death. These may seem strong words--but we are ready to
defend them in the face of all who may venture to impugn their truth.

This utter absence of Revealed Religion, where it ought to have been
all-in-all--for in such trials in real life it is all-in-all, or we
regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance--shocks far deeper
feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem
to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of
hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best
is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above
all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over
the orthodox Church-of-Englandism--for once to quote a not inexpressive
barbarism of Bentham--which every now