eached the point of composing verses _On Seeing a
Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes more worthy of
Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, _The Excursion_,
1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his death in 1850,
though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very thin and its
place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were
designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The Recluse_, which
was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of philosophical
discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary,
and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_ describes the development of
Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The Excursion_ the diction is
fairly Shaksperian.

"The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."

A passage not only beautiful in itself, but dramatically true, in the
mouth of the bereaved mother {232} who utters it, to that human instinct
which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The
Prelude_ can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's
loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in
the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like

"Golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds."

Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of Nature. In this province he
was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there
was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen years
before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the Hall_,
came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called Crabbe
"Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate
delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy
camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village
street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the
imaginative lift of Wordsworth,

"The light that never was on sea or land
The consecration and the poet's dream."

In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an
oak tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect
distinctly the very spot where this struck me. {233} The moment was
important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of
the infinite vari