_The Excursion_ was included in all the collected editions of 1827, 1832, 1836-7, 1840, 1845, 1849-50, in the Paris reprint of 1828, and in the American edition by Henry Reed. It was also republished by itself in 1836, 1844, and 1847. The textual changes in the several editions were numerous and significant. The longest and most important passage in the earlier ones, omitted after 1820, occurs at the close of the sixth book. Another (shorter) fragment, near the beginning of book seventh, refers to the Sympson household at the Wytheburn parsonage. No edition of _The Excursion_ has as yet been issued with adequate notes, either topographical or literary. The first book--"The Wanderer"--has, however, been annotated, both by Mr. H. H. Turner (published in Rivington's English School Classics), and also by the Rev. H. G. Robinson, Prebendary of York, and published at Edinburgh, by Messrs. Oliver and Boyd. The following letter from Charles Lamb to Wordsworth, after his first perusal of _The Excursion_ has special interest:-- _August 14, 1814._ "DEAR WORDSWORTH--I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but M. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it, but we expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read--a day in Heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the Tales of the Churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren, born out of due time, and not duly taken away again,--the deaf man and the blind man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude;--these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I saw you first at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset[J] is famous; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury Plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophets saw them in that sunset--the wheel, the potter's clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the fourfold visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat thereon. One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming,