again in the stirring days when the poets who divided public attention and interest with the Fabian struggle in Portugal and Spain, with the wild and terrible events of the Russian campaign, with the uprising of the Teutonic nations and the overthrow of Napoleon, were in a manner but commencing their cycle of songs.  This is to renew, to antedate, the youth of a majority of the living generation.  But only those whose memory still carries them so far back, can feel within them any reflex of that eager excitement with which the news of battles fought and won, or mailcoach copies of some new work of Scott, or Byron, or the Edinburgh Review, were looked for and received in those already old days.

[Footnote 3:  The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; an Autobiographical Poem.  By William Wordsworth.  London, Moxon. [New York, Appletons.]]

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 for 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.