to be in common, and the "cluster of families, bound together by congenial tastes and uniform forms rather than in self-depending and insulated households," were to solicit their food from daily toil, a thing which De Quincey says might have been fortunate for Coleridge. But none felt the enthusiasm of the time more intensely, nor expressed it more nobly than Wordsworth. He was the true human Poet of the time. He felt every pulse of the movement in his own heart, and responding to that he felt

From hour to hour the antiquated earth
Beat like the heart of man.

He describes its effect in the Excursion on a sorrowstricken, lonely man. He was roused from his grief by the crash of the Bastille, and from the wreck rose a golden palace, as it seemed, of equitable law and mild paternal sway.

The potent shock

I felt the transformation I perceived,
As marvellously seized as in that moment
When, from the blind mist issuing, 1 beheld
Glory-beyond all glory ever seen,

Confusion infinite of heaven and earth,

Dazzling the soul. Meanwhile, prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing, 'War shall cease;

Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?

Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck
The tree of Liberty.'-My heart rebounded;

My melancholy voice the chorus joined ;

'Be joyful all ye nations; in all lands,

Ye that are capable of joy be glad!
Henceforth whate'er is wanting to yourselves
In others ye shall promptly find—and all
Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth

Shall with one heart, honour their common kind.

He was reconverted to the world in the general joy. He haunted all assemblies where busy men, inspired with universal hope, met to unite nations. In the victory of mankind over wrong, he found his faith in God again. He returned to public worship, and felt a new meaning in the Hebrew Prophets when they thundered against oppression, when they foretold a reign of peace.

Nor when Wordsworth describes its effect upon himself is he less enthusiastic

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars that then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven !-Oh! times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress-to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtlety, and strength
Their ministers,-who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it ;-they, too, who, of gentle mood
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild,

We find our happiness, or not at all!

That was written in 1805 as he looked back on all he had felt, and the enthusiasm of the time is not dead in its noble verse. It was a dream, but it is a dream which hour by hour is fulfilling itself; and dream or not, it did a mighty work on Wordsworth. It built him into a man; it added the enthusiasm of Man to the enthusiasm of Nature; it took him away from contemplation of his own soul to live in the hopes, to proclaim the faith, to seek the love of mankind; it gave him the impulse to write some work, which should give form to the faith he now possessed in the glory of the future, and in the majesty of the powers, of Man. It led him all his life long-even when his Conservatism got the upper hand,―to be the champion of liberty, the hater of oppression in the present-however in his imaginative Toryism he might glorify the past. It made him the singer of simple life, of honest manners, of poverty and its sorrows, of the honour of humanity in all ranks—it taught him to see the face of God in every man.

It gave, De Quincey says, "to the whole system of his own thoughts and feelings a firmer tone, and a sense of the awful realities which surround the mind," of the awful sorrows and guilt and the still more awful goodness

which belong to Man in times of profound emotion, and underlie his nature always. And in this new and lurid but absorbing light, the passion for Nature was quenched. It reawoke afterwards, and how, we shall hereafter see; but at present, the destiny of Man, his origin, his duties, his rights, his possibilities, the agony of his battle, and the God with him-these were all in all to Wordsworth. He saw through a glass darkly, he only knew in part, but he had put away childish things for ever. He had entered on the dignity and sincere thinking of matured manhood. He was now trained not only to be the revealer of Nature, but also the Poet of Man.

LECTURE X.

THE Revolution with which Wordsworth came into contact in France, made a revolution in his mind. It carried him forward from a life with Nature to a life with Man. I discussed last Sunday some of the ideas that seized on him, and I traced their relation to theology, and their effect on Wordsworth. I propose to-day to continue the subject, and to connect what is to be said, partly with Wordsworth's life in France during 1791-92, and partly with his poetry.

We have seen that in 1789 the influence of Nature was predominant; but after his stay in London, where he was brought into closer contact with mankind in mass, the revolutionary movement sucked him into its whirlpool with amazing force, and shortly after Louis XVI. had taken the oath of fidelity to the new Constitution, he went to France to find the whole nation mad with joy. At first his ardour for freedom was more a sentiment than one of those profound convictions which create an enduring passion. In the guise of an enthusiast, he made a relic of a stone picked up where the Bastille had stood; but things of this kind seemed to touch him less than the sentimental paintings in the Louvre. He