From 1787 to 1842, Wordsworth is preoccupied with the themes of loss and death, and with "natural piety" in the lives of people and nations. Beginning with his consciousness of the Bards and Druids of Cumbria, this book treats Wordsworth's oeuvre, including the "Gothic" juvenilia, The Ruined Cottage, Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, The Excursion, and the Poems of 1842, as unified by a Bardic vocation, to bind "the living and the dead" and to nurture "the kind".