conditions fall far short of the poet's ideal. But it is of course
in the great and growing centres of population that the dangers
which he dreads have come upon us in their most aggravated form. And
so long as there are in England so many homes to which parental care
and the influences of Nature are alike unknown, no protest in favour
of the paramount importance of these primary agencies in the
formation of character can be regarded as altogether out of date.

With such severe and almost prosaic themes is the greater part of
the _Excursion_ occupied. Yet the poem is far from being composed
throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral made;" its
arguments and theories have lain long in Wordsworth's mind, and have
accreted to themselves a rich investiture of observation and feeling.
Some of its passages rank among the poet's highest flights. Such is
the passage in Book I describing the boy's rapture at sunrise; and
the picture of a sunset at the close of the same book. Such is the
opening of Book IV; and the passage describing the wild joy of
roaming through a mountain storm; and the metaphor in the same book
which compares the mind's power of transfiguring the obstacles which
beset her, with the glory into which the moon incorporates the
umbrage that would intercept her beams.

It would scarcely be possible at the present day that a work
containing such striking passages, and so much of substance and
elevation--however out of keeping it might be with the ruling taste
of the day--should appear without receiving careful study from many
quarters and warm appreciation in some recognized organs of opinion.
Criticism in Wordsworth's day was both less competent and less
conscientious, and the famous "This will never do" of Jeffrey in the
_Edinburgh Review_ was by no means an extreme specimen of the