ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth’s Pastor in The Excursion does partly match this description. He has some poor mountain parish, and he does minister to kindly folk. But Wordsworth makes him decidedly upper class and the occupant of the largest home in the village. The Excursion, while differing significantly from Emile in poetic philosophy, uses the structural form of the Profession from Rousseau’s novel for its formal basis. Alison Hickey succinctly summarizes the modern critical discontent with The Excursion and its possible religious viewpoint, emphasizing a variety of complaints that all tend towards seeing the work as involving institutional, Anglo-Catholic, conventional authority, as a piece that promulgates a specifically conservative, orthodox agenda. At the end of The Excursion, the Pastor and his family lead the three travelers to the top of a hillside to watch the sun set while the Pastor offers a prayer blessing their search for faith in a world of trials.
