So, too, in the Excursion, whose mention we perhaps dwelt upon too lightly--that grand Wordsworthian mating of man with Nature is always shining through the poet's purpose, and gleaming along his lines: a deep and radical purpose it is; all else sways to it; all else is dwarfed and made small in the comparison. Hence, poor Mary Lamb is half-justified in her outcry--that under its dominance a poor dweller in town has hardly "a soul to be saved."[9] Grand, surely, are many of his utterances, morally and intellectually, and carrying richest adornments of poesy to their livery; immortal--yes; yet not favorites for these many generations: too encumbered; sheathed about with tamer things, that will not let the sword of his intent gleam with a vital keenness and poignancy. Always the great lesson which the stars and the mountains and rolling rivers sing--sing in his lines; but buttressed with over-much building up of supporting and flanking words. Always the grand appeal to man's moral nature and instincts is imminent; always the verse radiant with the {337} beguiling lights which he has set to burn upon the hills and in the skies; but, too often, even the sunset glories pall, and weary with their over-painting and golden suffusions of language. If one is tempted to go back to the contemporary criticism of the _Excursion_, he should temper the matter-of-fact admeasurement and antipathies of Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_, with the kindlier and more feeling discourse of Charles Lamb in the _Quarterly_ (1814). And of this latter, it is to be remembered that its warm unction and earnestness were very much abated by editorial jugglery. Lamb never forgave Gifford for putting "his d----d shoemaker phraseology instead of mine;" and in an explanatory letter to Wordsworth he tells him that many passages are cut out altogether, and "what is left is of course the worse for their having been there," and in a wonderful figure continues,--"the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are left." _Personal History._