If thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness: that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used: that thought with him Is in its infancy. That is the teaching of earlier and serener years, of the time when the poet was still quietly embayed in youth, when jealous criticism, and envy, and disappointment were still trials of the future. Youth has its own passions; but it has also its peculiar serenity; and after Wordsworth had passed through the stormy years which gave him fame, we see the maturer man recalling the teaching of his calmer self. It was in obedience to this, as I believe, that he cancelled the passages that have just been mentioned; feeling their discord with the pure song of that early time. Let us now look at some of the passages which Wordsworth has emended, not by taking away from the words of his book, but by adding to them. As he wrote to Mr. Dyce, he diligently revised the "Excursion," in the edition of 1827, and got the sense "in several instances, ... into less room"; and minor changes are to be counted by hundreds. But he made some additions to this poem, and for significant reasons. Readers of Christopher North's essay, in the "Recreations," on "Sacred Poetry," will remember the long indictment which he there brings against the earlier poems of Wordsworth; he complains of them as being irreligious. It is interesting to find the earthly Christopher displaying the pious zeal of an inquisitor in the matter, declaring that in all of Wordsworth's writings, up to the "Excursion," "though we have much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most ingenious to detect much, if any, Christian religion"; and lamenting its absence even in the "Excursion," in the story of "Margaret," as told in the first book. This tale Christopher North calls "perhaps the most elaborate picture he [Wordsworth] ever painted of any conflict within any one human heart;" but he adds, with how much sincerity we will not now ask, that it "is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious mind--_that_ being wanting without which the entire representation is vitiated.... This utter absence of Revealed Religion ... throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven." That Wordsworth laid to heart this criticism, will appear on comparing the original passage, as reprobated by Christopher North, with the form which the poet gave it in the latter editions. Originally the peddler, finishing the story of "Margaret," moralizes thus: