WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 139 him enthusiastic encouragement to proceed. In the first transport of the con- ception he felt as if he needed only solitude and leisure for the continuous execution of it. But, though he had still before him fifty years of peaceful life amid his beloved scenery, the work in the projected form at least was des- tined to remain incomplete. Doubts and misgivings soon arose, and favorable moments of felt inspiration delayed their coming. To sustain him in his resolu- tion he thought of writing as an introduction, or, as he put it, an antechapel to the church which he proposed to build, a history of his own mind up to the time when he recognized the great mission of his life. It appears from a letter to his friend, Sir'George Beaumont, that his health was far from robust, and in partic- ular that he could not write without intolerable physical uneasiness. We should probably not be wrong in connecting his physical weakness with his rule of wait- ing for favorable moments. His next start with "The -Prelude," in the spring of 1804, was more prosperous ; he dropped it for several months, but, resuming again in the spring of 1805, he completed it in the summer of that year. But still the composition of the great work to which it was intended to be a portico proceeded by fits and starts. It was not till 18 14 that the second of the three divisions of " The Recluse," ultimately named "The Excursion," was ready for publication ; and he went no further in the execution of his great design. We shall speak presently of the reception of the "The Excursion." Mean- time, we must look elsewhere for the virtual accomplishment of the great design of " The Recluse." The purpose was not, after all, betrayed ; it was really ful- filled, though not in the form intended, in his various occasional poems. In re- lation to the edifice that he aspired to construct, he likened these poems to little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses ; they are really the completed work, much more firmly united by their common purpose than by any formal and visible nexus of words. Formally disconnected, they really, as we read and feel them, range themselves to spiritual music, as the component parts of a great poetic tem- ple, finding a rendezvous amid the scenery of the district where the poet had his local habitation. The Lake District, as transfigured by Wordsworth's imagina- tion, is the fulfilment of his ambition after an enduring memorial. The Poems, collected and published in 1807, compose in effect "a philosophical poem on Man, Nature, and Society," the title of which might fitly have been "The Re- cluse," "as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." As a realization of the idea of "The Recluse," these poems are, from every poetical point of view, infinitely superior to the kind of thing that he projected and failed to complete. The derisive fury with which " The Excursion " was assailed upon its first appearance has long been a stock example of critical blindness, conceit, and ma- lignity. And yet, if we look at the position now claimed for " The Excursion " by competent authorities, the error of the first critics is seen to be not in their indictment of faults, but in the prominence they gave to the faults, and their gen- erally disrespectful tone toward a poet of Wordsworth's greatness. Jeffrey's pet- ulant " This will never do," uttered, professedly, at least, more in sorrow than in
