For well nigh thirty-four years the public curiosity has been excited by the knowledge that there existed in MS. an unfinished poem of very high pretensions, and extraordinary magnitude, from the pen of the late--is he to be the last?--poet-laureate of Britain. At the tidings, Lord Jeffrey made himself very merry, and sought for a powerful calculus to compute the supposed magnitude of the poem. De Quincey, on the other hand, had read it, and both in his writings and conversation, was in the habit of alluding to, quoting, and panegyrizing it as more than equal to Wordsworth's other achievements. All of it that is publishable, or shall ever be published, now lies before us; and we approach it with curiously-mingled emotions--mingled, because although a fragment, it is so vast, and in parts so finished, and because it may be regarded as at once an early production of his genius, and its latest legacy to the world. It seems a large fossil relic--imperfect and magnificent--newly dug up, and with the fresh earth and the old dim subsoil meeting and mingling around it. The "Prelude" is the first _regular versified_ autobiography we remember in our language. Passages, indeed, and parts of the lives of celebrated men, have been at times represented in verse, but in general a vail of fiction has been dropped over the real facts, as in the case of Don Juan; and in all the revelation made has resembled rather an escapade or a partial confession than a systematic and slowly-consolidated life. The mere circumstances, too, of life have been more regarded than the inner current of life itself. We class the 'Prelude' at once with Sartor Resartus--although the latter wants the poetic _form_--as the two most interesting and faithful records of the individual experience of men of genius which exist.