It was almost entirely at Grasmere, between the years 1800 and 1805, that he composed “The Prelude,” an autobiographic poem on the growth of his own mind. It is for the purpose of better understanding this poem that I have given the foregoing brief framework of the outward facts of Wordsworth’s life on which “The Prelude” comments from within. The poem consists of fourteen books in blank verse, probably the most elaborate biographic poem ever composed. Readers of Lord Macaulay’s Life may perhaps remember his remarks on it: “There are,” he says, “the old raptures about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the effects of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics; the endless wildernesses of dull, flat, prosaic declamations interspersed.” No one need be astonished at this estimate by Lord Macaulay. We see but as we feel. To him, being such as he was, it was not given to feel or to see the things which Wordsworth most cared for. No wonder, then, that to him the poem that spoke of these things was a weariness. Doubtless much may be said against such a subject for a poem—the growth of a poet’s mind from childhood to maturity: much too against the execution, the sustained self-analysis, the prolixity of some parts, the verbosity and sometimes the vagueness of the language. But after making full deduction for all these things, it still remains a wonderful and unique poem, most instructive to those who will take the trouble required to master such a work. If after a certain acquaintance with Wordsworth’s better-known and more attractive poems, a person will but study “The Prelude,” he will return to the other poems with a new insight into their meaning and their truth. How highly Coleridge esteemed it those know who remember the poem in which he describes the impression made on himself by hearing Wordsworth read it aloud for the first time after its completion:— “An Orphic song indeed, A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts, To their own music chanted.” This poem, read to Coleridge in 1805, was not given to the world till July, 1850, a few months after the author’s death. The reason why I shall now dwell on it at some length is because no other production of Wordsworth’s gives us so deep and sustained a view of his feeling about Nature, and of the relation which he believed to exist between Nature and the soul of man.