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‘language of the sense’ 5 that Wordsworth followed in his conceptualisation of imagination, which wastied more closely to Aristotle’s, rather than Locke’s, or Hartley’s, empiricism.The Excursion is written as a narrative, presented in an imaginative ‘poetic’ form to facilitatethe reader imagining that he or she had actually participated in the philosophical dialogues that arerehearsed. Through such imaginative participation Wordsworth had hoped that his discourse mighthave made a substantial impression on the minds of his readers and have served to educate their‘imaginations’. In this use of the term, the reader’s ‘imagination’ is understood to describe his or herenduring perception of things in the mind, as well as the faculty that enables them to remain in thememory as an aspect of a ‘self’ that persists in time. In this sense someone’s ‘imagination’ might beunderstood as that person’s sense of self-identity or soul, a reading that Thomas McFarland discussesin his study Originality and Imagination. 6 Wordsworth uses imagination in a similar sense in hisfamous letter to Lady Beaumont in 1807 in which he also comments upon the diminished capacity ofmost of his reader’s imaginations. 7The lines set out as a Prospectus were provocative, and Wordsworth obviously consideredthem important as he used them to place the arguments of The Excursion in some kind of a context,and I will be return to them, briefly, in my conclusion. The Address to Lord Lonsdale that precededthe brief Preface, subtly distinguishes his work as a poet ‘Now’, from that of his youth, when he‘roamed, on youthful pleasures bent; / And mused in rocky cell or sylvan tent / Beside swift-flowingLowther’s current clear’ (PW V 1). The ‘Work’ he presents to Lonsdale ‘now’ is something quitedifferent from the fanciful and ‘inspired’ productions of his youth. His prefatory remarks explain howThe Excursion came to be the second part of ‘The Recluse’, relating that when, several years ago, hehadretired to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary workthat might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, andexamine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such employment. As subsidiaryto 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, addressed to a dear Friend, mostdistinguished for his knowledge and genius, has long been finished; and the result of theinvestigation 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. (PW V 2) 8The ‘Work, addressed to a dear Friend’ – the 1805 Prelude – is, significantly, described as ‘longfinished’. Its completion was marked by the fact that, in finishing it, Wordsworth felt able to declarehimself ‘capable / Of building up a Work that should endure’ (Prelude XIII 277-8). And in the5 ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’.6 In The Prelude Wordsworth refers to ‘The soul, [as] the imagination of the whole’ (XIII 65).Hume’s sceptical claim that he could find no evidence for the continuity of his consciousness had raisedquestions about the reality of this ‘soul’ for eighteenth-century thinkers.7 (MY I 146) I discuss this letter below.8 The ‘Address to Coleridge’, though completed in 1805, describes the growth of Wordsworth’s mind up to thetime of the Alfoxden year; the time when he first voiced his determination to write an epic giving ‘pictures ofNature, Man, and Society’.96