record in verse the origin and progress of his own powers, as far
as he was acquainted with them. This was at once an exercise in
versification, and a test for the kind of poetry for which he was
by temperament fitted. The result was a determination to compose a
philosophical poem containing views of man, of nature, and of society.
This, ambitious conception has been doomed to share the fate of so
many other colossal undertakings. Of the three parts of his _Recluse_,
thus planned, only the second, (the _Excursion_, published in 1814,)
has been completed. Of the other two there exists only the first book
of the first, and the plan of the third. The _Recluse_ will remain in
fragmentary greatness, a poetical Cathedral of Cologne.

Matters standing thus, it has not been without a melancholy sense of
the uncertainty of human projects, and of the contrast between the
sanguine enterprise and its silent evaporation (so often the "history
of an individual mind"), that we have perused this _Prelude_ which no
completed strain was destined to follow. Yet in the poem itself there
is nothing to inspire depression. It is animated throughout with the
hopeful confidence in the poet's own powers, so natural to the time
of life at which it was composed; it evinces a power and soar of
imagination unsurpassed in any of his writings; and its images and
incidents have a freshness and distinctness which they not seldom
lost, when they came to be elaborated, as many of them were, in his
minor poems of a later date.

The _Prelude_, as the title-page indicates, is a poetical
autobiography, commencing with the earliest reminiscences of the
author, and continued to the time at which it was composed. We are
told that it was begun in 1799 and completed, in 1805. It consists
of fourteen books. Two are devoted to the infancy and school-time of