[FROM THE EXAMINER.]

WORDSWORTH'S POSTHUMOUS POEM.[3]

This is a voice that speaks to us across a gulf of nearly fifty years.
A few months ago Wordsworth was taken from us at the ripe age of
fourscore, yet here we have him addressing the public, as for the
first time, with all the fervor, the unworn freshness, the hopeful
confidence of thirty. We are carried back to the period when
Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Rogers, and Moore were in their youthful
prime. We live again in the stirring days when the poets who divided
public attention and interest with the Fabian struggle in Portugal and
Spain, with the wild and terrible events of the Russian campaign, with
the uprising of the Teutonic nations and the overthrow of Napoleon,
were in a manner but commencing their cycle of songs. This is to
renew, to antedate, the youth of a majority of the living generation.
But only those whose memory still carries them so far back, can feel
within them any reflex of that eager excitement with which the news of
battles fought and won, or mailcoach copies of some new work of Scott,
or Byron, or the _Edinburgh Review_, were looked for and received in
those already old days.

[Footnote 3: The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an
Autobiographical Poem. By William Wordsworth. London, Moxon. [New
York, Appletons.]]

We need not remind the readers of the _Excursion_ that when Wordsworth
was enabled by the generous enthusiasm of Raisley Calvert to retire
with a slender independence to his native mountains, there to devote
himself exclusively to his art, his first step was to review and