garet with so many coats of metaphysical varnish, but ends with finding all unavailing, Pray, amongst your other experiments, did you ever try the effect of a guinea?' Supposing this, however, to be a remedy beyond his fortitude, at least he might have offered a little rational advice, which costs no more than civility. Let us look steadily at the case. The particular calamity under which Margaret groaned was, the loss of her husband, who had enlisted. There is something, even on the husband's part, in this enlistment, to which the reader can hardly extend his compassion. The man had not gone off, it is true, as a heartless deserter of his family, or in profligate quest of pleasure cheerfully he would have stayed and worked, had trade been good: but, as it was not, he found it impossible to support the spectacle of domestic suffering: he takes the bounty of a recruiting sergeant, and off he marches with his regiment. Nobody reaches the summit of heartlessness at once: and, accordingly, in this early stage of his desertion, we are not surprised to find that part (but what part?) of the bounty had been silently conveyed to his wife. So far we are barely not indignant: but as time wears on we become highly so; for no letter does he ever send to his poor forsaken partner, either of tender excuse, or of encouraging prospects. Yet, if he had done this, still we must condemn him. Millions have supported (and supported without praise or knowledge of man) that trial from which he so weakly fled. Even in this, and going no further, he was a voluptuary. Millions have heard and acknowledged, as a secret call from Heaven, the summons, not only to

take their own share of household suffering, as a mere sacrifice to the spirit of manliness, but also to stand the far sterner trial of witnessing the same privations in a wife and little childen. To evade this, to slip his neck out of the yoke, when God summons a poor man to such a trial, is the worst form of cowardice. And Margaret's husband, by adding to this cowardice subsequently an entire neglect of his family, not so much as intimating the destination of the regiment, forfeits his last hold upon our lingering sympathy. But with him, it will be said, the poet has not connected the leading thread of the interest. Certainly not: though in some degree by a reaction from his character depends the respectability of Margaret's grief. And it is impossible to turn away from his case entirely, because from the act of the enlistment is derived the whole movement of the story. Here it is that we must tax the wandering philosopher with treason. He found so luxurious a pleasure in contemplating a pathetic phthisis of heart in the abandoned wife, that the one obvious counsel in her particular distress which dotage could not have overlooked he suppresses. And yet this in the revolution of a week would have brought her effectual relief. Surely the regiment, into which her husband had enlisted, bore some number: it was the king's 'dirty half-hundred' or the rifle brigade or some corps known to men and the Horse Guards. Instead, therefore, of suffering poor Margaret to loiter at a gate, looking for answers to her questions from vagrant horsemen, a process which reminds one of a sight, sometimes extorting at once smiles and deep pity, in the crowded thoroughfares of

the wanderer should station of that detachThis must have been

London, namely, a little child innocently asking with tearful eyes from strangers for the mother whom it has lost in that vast wilderness at once have inquired for the ment which had enlisted him. in the neighborhood. Here he would have obtained all the particulars. That same night he would have written to the War-Office; and in a very few days, an official answer, bearing the indorsement, On H. M.'s Service, would have placed Margaret in communication with the truant. To have overlooked a point of policy so broadly apparent as this, vitiates and nullifies the very basis of the story. Even for a romance it will not do; far less for a philosophic poem dealing with intense realities. No such case of distress could have lived for one fortnight, nor have survived a single interview with the rector, the curate, the parish-clerk, with the schoolmaster, the doctor, the attorney, the innkeeper, or the exciseman,

But, apart from the vicious mechanism of the incidents, the story is even more objectionable by the doubtful quality of the leading character from which it derives its pathos. Had any one of us readers held the office of coroner in her neighborhood, he would have found it his duty to hold an inquest upon the body of her infant. This child, as every reader could depose, (now when the details have been published by the poet,) died of neglect; not through direct cruelty, but through criminal self-indulgence. Self-indulgence in what? Not in liquor, yet not altogether in fretting. Sloth, and the habit of gadding abroad, were most in fault. The wanderer himself might have been called

as a witness for the crown, to prove that the infant was left to sleep in solitude for hours: the key even was taken away, as if to intercept the possibility (except through burglary) of those tender attentions from some casual stranger, which the unfeeling mother had withdrawn. The child absolutely awoke whilst the philosopher was listening at the door. It cried; but finally hushed itself to sleep. That looks like a case of Dalby's carminative. But this crisis could not have been relied on tragical catastrophes arise from neglected crying; ruptures in the first place, a very common result in infants; rolling out of bed, followed by dislocation of the neck; fits, and other short cuts to death. It is hardly any praise to Margaret that she carried the child to that consummation by a more lingering road.

This first tale, therefore, must and will, if Mr. Wordsworth retains energy for such recasts of a laborious work, be cut away from its connection with 'The Excursion.' This is the more to be expected from a poet aware of his own importance and anxious for the perfection of his works, because nothing in the following books depends upon this narrative. No timbers or main beams need to be sawed away; it is but a bolt that is to be slipped, a rivet to be unscrewed. And yet, on the other hand, if the connection is slight, the injury is great: for we all complain heavily of entering a temple dedicated to new combinations of truth through a vestibule of falsehood. And the falsehood is double; falsehood in the adjustment of the details, (however separately possible,) falsehood in the character which, wearing the mask of profound sen

timent, does apparently repose upon dyspepsy and sloth.

Far different in value and in principle of composition is the next tale in The Excursion.' This occupies the fourth book, and is the impassioned record from the infidel solitary of those heart-shaking chapters in his own life which had made him what the reader finds him. Once he had not been a solitary; once he had not been an infidel: now he is both. He lives in a little urn-like valley (a closet-recess from Little Langdale by the description) amongst the homely household of a yeoman: he is become a bitter cynic; and not against man alone, or society alone, but against upon

the laws of hope or fear which both repose. If he endures the society with which he is now connected, it is because, being dull, that society is of few words; it is because, being tied to hard labor, that society goes early to bed, and packs up its dulness at eight, P. M. in blankets; it is because, under the acute inflictions of Sunday, or the chronic inflictions of the Christmas holidays, that dull society is easily laid into a magnetic sleep by three passes of metaphysical philosophy. The narrative of this misanthrope is grand and impassioned; not creeping by details and minute touches, but rolling through capital events, and uttering its pathos through great representative abstractions. Nothing can be finer than when, upon the desolation of his household, upon the utter emptying of his domestic chambers by the successive deaths of children and youthful wife, just at that moment the mighty phantom of the French Revolution rises solemnly above the horizon; even then new earth and new heavens are