About a month after his brother’s death, Wordsworth concluded his “Prelude,” upon which he had been employed for upwards of six years. In allusion to this poem, Coleridge, in the “Table Talk,” says: “I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books (there are fourteen of them,) “On the growth of an individual mind,”--superior, as I used to think, on the whole, to the “Excursion!” ... Then the plan laid out, and I believe partly suggested by me was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, a subject of eye, ear, touch and taste, in contact with external nature, and inferring the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration.” Wordsworth himself unfolds his own plan of the poem to Sir George Beaumont, in a letter dated December 25th, 1804. It was to consist, first of all, of a poem to be called “The Recluse,” wherein the poet was to express in verse, his own feelings concerning Man, Nature, and Society--and, secondly, a poem on his _earlier life_ or the _growth of his own mind_. This latter poem was “The Prelude,” two thousand verses of which, he says, in the same letter, he had written during the last ten weeks. “The Prelude,” therefore, which was not published till after the poet’s death, was first written, and “The Recluse,” subsequently. Only a part of this poem, however--viz., “The Excursion,” except, of course, “The Prelude,” is published; “The Recluse” Proper, being still in MS.