INTRODUCTION.

"THE

HE WANDERER" forms the first book of the Excursion, which is the longest of Wordsworth's poems. The Excursion was, however, itself intended to form the second part of a still larger work to be called the Recluse. Of this larger work we have, besides the Excursion, only the closing lines of the first part. The third part was only planned, never written, and its materials have probably found expression in shorter poems.

The Excursion differed in plan from the rest of the Recluse by being represented as the utterance of persons other than the author; but no great effort is made to obtain dramatic effect.

The relation of the Excursion to the Prelude, the only other poem of considerable length that Wordsworth ever undertook, is thus expressed in the author's preface to the first edition of the former poem (published 1814):

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Several years ago, when the author retired to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far nature and education had qualified him for such an employment.

"As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them.

"That work (The Prelude), addressed to a dear friend

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most distinguished for his knowledge and genius (S. T. Coleridge), and to whom the author's intellect is deeply indebted, is long finished; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it was a determination to compose a philosophical poem containing views of man, nature, and society, and to be entitled The Recluse, as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement. . . . The two works (the Prelude and the Excursion) have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the ante-chapel has to the body of a Gothic church."

The Wanderer was written in the last few years of the eighteenth century, when Wordsworth was living at Racedown, in Dorsetshire, or with his sister Dorothy, as a near neighbour of Coleridge, at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, and is described by Coleridge himself as the "best blank verse in the English language.” It was first published, with the rest of the Excursion, in 1814.

THE EXCURSION.

Book E.

THE WANDERER.

ARGUMENT. A summer forenoon. The Author reaches a ruined cottage upon a common, and there meets with a revered friend, the Wanderer, of whose education and course of life he gives an account.-The Wanderer, while resting under the shade of the trees that surround the cottage, relates the history of its last inhabitant.

'TWAS summer, and the sun had mounted high:
Southward the landscape indistinctly glared
Through a pale steam; but all the northern downs,
In clearest air ascending, showed far off

A surface dappled o'er with shadows flung
From brooding clouds; shadows that lay in spots
Determined and unmoved, with steady beams
Of bright and pleasant sunshine interposed;
To him most pleasant who on soft cool moss
Extends his careless limbs along the front
Of some huge cave, whose rocky ceiling casts
A twilight of its own, an ample shade,

Where the wren warbles, while the dreaming man,
Half conscious of the soothing melody,
With side-long eye looks out upon the scene,
By power of that impending covert thrown
To finer distance. Mine was at that hour
Far other lot, yet with good hope that soon
Under a shade as grateful I should find
Rest, and be welcomed there to livelier joy.
Across a bare wide Common I was toiling
With languid steps that by the slippery turf
Were baffled; nor could my weak arm disperse

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The host of insects gathering round my face,
And ever with me as I paced along.

Upon that open moorland stood a grove, The wished-for port to which my course was bound. Thither I came, and there, amid the gloom Spread by a brotherhood of lofty elms, Appeared a roofless Hut; four naked walls That stared upon each other!-I looked round, And to my wish and to my hope espied The Friend I sought; a Man of reverend age, But stout and hale, for travel unimpaired. There was he seen upon the cottage-bench, Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep; An iron-pointed staff lay at his side.

Him had I marked the day before-alone And stationed in the public way, with face

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Turned toward the sun then setting, while that staff 40 Afforded to the figure of the man,

Detained for contemplation or repose,

Graceful support; his countenance as he stood
Was hidden from my view, and he remained
Unrecognised; but, stricken by the sight,
With slackened footsteps I advanced, and soon
A glad congratulation we exchanged

At such unthought-of meeting. For the night
We parted, nothing willingly; and now
He by appointment waited for me here,
Under the covert of these clustering elms.

We were tried Friends; amid a pleasant vale,
In the antique market-village where was passed
My school-time, an apartment he had owned,
To which at intervals the Wanderer drew,
And found a kind of home or harbour there.
He loved me; from a swarm of rosy boys
Singled out me, as he in sport would say,
For my grave looks, too thoughtful for my years.
As I grew up, it was my best delight

To be his chosen comrade. Many a time,
On holidays, we rambled through the woods:
We sate-we walked; he pleased me with report

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