Sunday, 7th.--"William had a bad night, and was working at his poem. We sate by the fire, and did not walk, but read 'The Pedlar,' thinking it done; but lo! ... could find fault with no one part of it--it was uninteresting, and must be altered. Poor William!" Wednesday, 10th Feb.--"We read the first part of the poem, and were delighted with it, but William afterwards got to some ugly place, and went to bed tired out." ... Thursday, 11th.-- ... "William sadly tired, and working at 'The Pedlar.'" Friday, 12th.-- ... "I re-copied 'The Pedlar'; but poor William all the time at work.... We sate a long time with the window unclosed, and almost finished writing 'The Pedlar,' but poor William wore himself out and me with labour. Went to bed at 12 o'clock." Saturday, 13th.--"It snowed a little. Still at work at 'The Pedlar,' altering and re-fitting.... William read parts of his _Recluse_ aloud to me."... Sunday, 14th Feb.-- ... "William left me at work altering some passages of 'The Pedlar,' and went into the orchard." Sunday, Feb. 28.-- ... "William very ill; employed himself with 'The Pedlar.'" Friday morning.-- ... "I wrote 'The Pedlar,' and finished it."... These extracts--which will recall the laborious way in which he toiled over the poem _Michael_ (see vol. ii. p. 233)--all refer to the close of the year 1801, and the beginning of the year 1802. It is impossible to find out, with exactness, what were the parts of _The Excursion_ which were then so carefully written, and so fastidiously altered--since "The Pedlar" was the Wordsworth household name for the entire poem, until it was recast for publication, at Allan Bank. But after February 1802 he turned to other subjects of composition, chiefly lyrical, and laid aside "The Pedlar" for a time--his sister, at least, regarding it as "finished." What was completed, however, did not, probably, extend beyond the story of the Wanderer, and perhaps a part of that of the Solitary. The person, whose character gave rise to the Solitary, came to reside at Grasmere not long after the Wordsworths settled there; but as the Fenwick note expressly says that the poem was written "_chiefly_ during our residence at Allan Bank," I do not think that more than the first two books belong to the Town-end period. _The Excursion_ was originally published in quarto in 1814. The second edition, octavo, appeared in 1820.[I]