The Excursion, the most ambitious, and, with all its defects, the greatest of his works, was published in 1814. Here the poet was in his true element. Wordsworth’s genius was essentially moralising and reflective. Incidents and adventure had no charm for him. He arrived at his knowledge of character by an inductive process, not like Shakespeare, by the intuition of sympathy and imagination. He had no power of perceiving those light and graceful peculiarities of men and society, generally designated manners, vivid presentations of which constitute the charm of so many poets; but he was tremulously alive to the charms of inanimate nature. ‘——The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were there to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.’ His soul was full of lofty and imaginative conceptions of moral truths. He, therefore, after severe examination of his own poems, resolved to rest his claims to immortality on his composition of ‘a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society; and to be entitled The Recluse, as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.’ How far this projected work has been advanced to completion, we have no means of knowing. A preliminary work, descriptive of the growth of his own powers, is, he has informed us, finished. The Recluse was to consist of three parts, the first and third containing chiefly meditations in the author’s own person; the intermediate introducing characters in a semi-dramatic form. It is to be regretted that his second part has alone been published, for Wordsworth’s genius was essentially undramatic. But notwithstanding the disadvantages under which the poet laboured from the selection of an uncongenial form, and his imperfect mastery of blank verse (a measure of which, perhaps. Milton alone among our English poets has developed the full measure, and varied power of modulation), the Excursion is, undoubtedly, a poem in the highest and truest sense of the word. The philosophical musings with which it abounds, are alike profound and elevating. And nothing can surpass the deep pathos of the episodes of Margaret and Ellen. The subsequent publications of Wordsworth may be briefly enumerated. Peter Bell and the Waggoner appeared within two years after the Excursion; and the White Doe of Rylstone soon followed them. A miscellaneous volume, of which the River Duddon was the most prominent, was published in 1820, and Yarrow Revisited, in 1835. Of all these works, it may suffice to say that they are highly characteristic of the author, and contain many beauties.