Letter from Uvedale Price, Foxley, to Sir George Beaumont, 1815 March 18 : fragment of an autograph manuscript.

Saying that he has read Wordsworth's poem The Excursion very attentively and "I thoroughly agree with you, that a person who does not admire its various beauties, can have no taste for the sublime, the beautiful or the picturesque"; adding "I also agree with you that it is too contemplative to be generally popular; & indeed the author himself seems to have been aware of it, & prepared for such a consequence, when he says in his poetical preface 'fit audience let me find, though few'"; discussing the poem's virtues; agreeing with the Beaumonts that in some places it is too long; saying that this could be dealt with by "judicious suppressions & alterations; but I know how harsh & unpalatable such a proposition must be to an author after publication"; commenting "Many advantages arise from a secluded & meditative state of existence, where there are strong powers of mind, & an active imagination; numberless relations between visible objects, & moral & intellectual ideas & feelings, present themselves at every moment to such a person [...] These relations, as we have full proof in The Excursion, produce in poetry new & striking images, cloaked in expressions equally new & striking"; saying that this can also produce "vague & obscure allusions & images & consequent obscurity of expression"; saying that solitude can also produce "a habit of analyzing & dwelling on the detail of every thing both visible & intellectual"; reminding the Beaumonts of how surprised they were, when Price read them a poem he calls The Woman in the Red Cloak (possibly the poem The Thorn), to find that Wordsworth had spent many stanzas describing "a little tump of moss with a decayed stump of a thorn upon it"; writing "the description itself is excellent; & such a microscopic kind of painting, whether of what we see outwardly, or feel inwardly, is very curious & amusing, but as few readers are flies, or have either microscopic eyes or mind, a propensity to analyzing is one that in poetry requires to be watched & restrained"; discussing the quality of simplicity in the poem; quoting lines from various passages to support his arguments; pointing to passages that he feels are too prosaic and suggesting an edit to one line to avoid "offending against the usual laws of metre or of poetical language"; objecting to the word "thoroughly" in particular.