Gardes du Corps. He is much attached to his sister-inlaw, and has given us a very pleasing account of her. The mother's details of the wedding festivities would have amused you. She was to give the fête, she who perhaps for half a year to come will feel the effects of it at every dinner she cooks! Thirty persons were present to dinner, ball, and supper. The deputies of the department and many other respectable people were there. The bride was dressed in white sarsenet, with a white veil was the admiration of all who beheld her, but her modesty was her best ornament.' She kept her veil on the whole of the day. How truly French this is! Sara's desire to go to France is much abated since the removal of the pictures, etc., and, indeed, I know not how we can afford the expense of both going this year, and I should be very unwilling, if I could hear of companions, to put off either for the sake of better times or for the insecure promise of the company of my friends, great as would be the comfort of having an English friend with me at Paris. Should I go to France this summer, I should also have the happiness of seeing you, for I could not be so near you without it."

CHAPTER XXVI

"THE EXCURSION"

"THE EXCURSION" was published in a sumptuous quarto in July, 1814, with a wretched dedicatory sonnet to the Earl of Lonsdale, a short prose Preface, and 107 introductory lines of magnificent poetry, now printed as the last lines of "A Fragment of The Recluse." The price was two guineas. As we have seen, it had occupied the poet's mind with increasing exclusiveness almost from the time of his arrival in Grasmere. Portions of it, indeed, were written at Racedown or Alfoxden. The plan of executing a great work, a long philosophical poem, which should embody the results of his experience and thinking, had been formed before even the first two books of "The Prelude " were composed. It had been discussed with Coleridge. It had finally taken in Wordsworth's life a supremacy contested only by desires for public service, such as we find translated in his tract on the Convention of Cintra. Yet with all the many explanations of his purpose which exist in his notes and correspondence, one can form no precise idea of what it was. This much, however, is plain; there was to be a poem, in three parts, entitled "The Recluse." "The Excursion" is the second member of this projected whole. Of the first part, only one book was ever written, the splendid lines known as the" Fragment of The Recluse." This gives no clue as to how many books were intended to follow, nor with what topics they were to deal. Of a

In the Fenwick note Wordsworth distinctly avers that lines 871 to 916 of Book I. were composed in 1795, and lines 1207 to 1275 next in order at Racedown or Alfoxden. If so much, probably far more, especially of Book I., was probably composed at that early time, though perhaps not in finished form.

third part nothing was ever written, and there is no trace even of a plan. "The Prelude " is a separate work.

One would scarcely imagine, from reading "The Excursion," that it was not an independent poem. How it was to have been related to Parts I. and III. is not evident. As an excuse for publishing it first, the author, in his Preface, says: "As the second division of the work was designed to refer more to passing events, and to an existing state of things, than the others were meant to do, more continuous exertion was naturally bestowed upon it, and greater progress made here than in the rest of the poem." Balzac, at a certain point in his career, decided, not only that his future works should belong to a system, but that many already written were suitable for adoption into the "Comédie Humaine." In like manner, and with even less valid reason, Wordsworth announced in 1814 that "The Prelude" would be to "The Recluse "what the antechapel is to the body of a Gothic cathedral, and that his minor pieces, which had been long before the public, would, when properly arranged, be like " the little cells, oratories and sepulchral recesses ordinarily included in those edifices."

Constructive power was certainly not Wordsworth's strongest faculty. Nor had he the gift of seeing his own works as if through the eyes of other people. When we observe the many cunning devices by which Virgil and Dante have varied the progress of their long poems, while at the same time bringing into ever clearer relief the one grand idea in each, we cannot help smiling at Wordsworth's confidence that human nature would tolerate a poem so loosely knit and yet so monotonous as apparently his was planned to be. Yet in all his other works, verse or prose, he shows the true artist's instinct for design, keeping one purpose always in view, isolating his subject, and giving to every production a definite, inevitable, and foreseen end. We may take for granted, then, that "The Recluse was carefully planned, though Coleridge's bewilderment,* on finding * Letter to Wordsworth, May 30, 1815.

1814)

ITS GENERAL SCHEME

221

"The Excursion" quite a different thing from what he had expected, leads to the conclusion that an original and much grander design was abandoned.

"The Excursion" as a whole has not in itself that unity which doubtless the projected work would have had, and which "The Prelude," taken by itself, actually has. There is no apparent reason why it should end where it does, and its purpose is not obvious. In the main, the first half contains the statement of a philosophical position, and the second half a number of human stories which are supposed in some way to establish or illustrate it.

The formal scheme of the whole is simple. The poet is represented as meeting accidentally a respected friend, an old Scottish peddler, whose travels have enriched his naturally powerful mind. This man, the Wanderer, relates the story of a poor woman whose happy home was broken up by "the plague of war," but who endured her fate with quiet courage. The description of the Wanderer, and this tale of Margaret, filled the First Book, which is in many ways distinct from the other eight. Much of it was written at Racedown and Alfoxden. So completely, indeed, was the frame already fixed of what is now Book Two, that when, nearly twenty years later, the poet incorporated this portion in " The Excursion," he was unable to avoid the inconsistency of having the scene begin on a bare common in the south of England, and then, for no apparent reason, suddenly change to the region of the Lakes. The real reason was that the rest of the poem was to consist largely of stories from actual life among the hills and descriptions of the scenery there.

The Wanderer is thoroughly characterized. He is a Christian optimist, well furnished with theological dogma, and rather grimly triumphant in the apparent failure of the age of reason. With the opening of Book Two we are unmistakably in the Lake country. The Wanderer invites the poet to walk with him to the lonely pass which connects Upper and Lower Langdale, there to visit the Solitary, a man who has withdrawn

from a world in which his hopes have been baffled and his faith in God and man shaken. The Solitary tells the story of his life in Book Three, and the Wanderer in the Fourth attempts to correct his despondency by showing that communion with nature and the exercise of imagination are sources of divine knowledge, and capable of lifting the soul above the rough ground where reason stumbles. In Book Five all three descend to "a large and populous vale," which in most of its features is the Vale of Grasmere, where they enter the churchyard and church, commenting on what they see. The Pastor joins them, and supports the Poet and the Wanderer in their efforts to correct the Solitary's views. The Sixth Book opens with a eulogy on the State and Church of England. The Pastor, looking at the green mounds of the dead, recalls the lives of many former members of his mountain parish. The mere recital of human stories, with no effort to point a moral, awakens in the Solitary a certain zest for things as they are. The Seventh Book is a continuation of the Sixth. In Book Eight the four speakers enter the parsonage, and the talk turns to a criticism of science, the rise of manufacturing industry, and the degradation of the agricultural population. In the Ninth Book the value of state schools and compulsory education is eloquently proclaimed; the Wanderer declares that an active principle pervades the universe; the Pastor identifies this spirit with the God of Christendom, to whom he utters a prayer of gratitude; and finally the Solitary, deeply affected, departs. "What renovation had been brought " to this dejected man will, if the poet receives encouragement from hope and gentle hearts and lofty minds, be told in future labours-i.e., the Third and never-written part of" The Recluse."

A captious criticism might deny that there was sufficient connection between the theoretical and the practical parts of the poem; but it seems to me rather an evidence of Wordsworth's fidelity to nature that he refrained from distorting even imaginary facts to suit the most cherished theory. He realized that the most