But the despairing view soon passed away, and when the country went to war with the despot, he became ashamed of his "unfilial fears" and found in her the "bulwark for the cause of men ;" one, at least, who held that it was

an accursed thing to gaze

On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye.

Shall the Godhead, he asks, who dwells in Nature and the affections and the soul of man, pour his bounty on city and on field, and yet have no thought of the awful contest for the liberties of man; is it to be our doom, to have no hope, to have faith in no promise of God?

Nay, forbid it Heaven!

We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws

To which the triumph of all good is given,

High sacrifice, and labour without pause,

Even to the death-else wherefore should the eye
Of man converse with immortality?

He followed the whole continental struggle of the nations against Napoleon, step by step; and as year by year the ambition of Napoleon declared itself as the will of France, as the nation which had preached liberty laid itself at the feet of one man, and went forth to enslave; as year by year the nation which had declared the equal rights of man, fought to take away those rights; as year by year, the nation which had said that there was but one nation, the nation of mankind, laboured to prove by violence that there was only one nation-the nation of France that mankind was created for France and not France for mankind; as year by year every principle of the Revolution was reversed-Wordsworth felt more and more strongly the uselessness of mere political theories to

give birth to permanent liberty, and he put them out of his mind.

But it was a somewhat perilous thing for a poet of Man to lose his interest in theories of Man. For it is on theory and the ideas it presupposes that the poet who would speak of mankind exists. They are his nectar and ambrosia, and when he can delight in them and assimilate them no longer, he sinks out of the ideal life and world, where art abides, into the common and the commonplace. But if he have once lived therein, he brings with him and retains for a time the celestial light, and he may manage, as Wordsworth did, to find poetry in life's familiar face for many years. Yet, as time goes onnever soaring into the impossible or towards it, never lost in an Idea-he wins no Promethean fire, breathes none of that diviner air which would enable him to glorify the common, to see the infinite hope in the mean reality. Then the light he has had lingers, but it slowly dies away, and the prose of life overcomes his human poetry in the end. It was very well for Wordsworth to give up theories about the future of man, but he did so too completely, and the end thereof was Prose.

LECTURE XI.

IN speaking last Sunday afternoon of the three great lines of thought on which Wordsworth's interest ran, when in France he was brought into contact with the Revolution, I omitted the last, for which there was no time. It was the moral aspect of the Revolution as the avenger of oppression, and the general hatred of the oppression of nations by tyrannous rule. It was a hatred which he learnt from what he saw in France, and it lasted almost his whole life, though it changed its form. And it was accompanied though he had put aside theories of liberty and the rights of Man-by a steady ardour for liberty, which diminished but never altogether died. These are the points on which I shall enlarge in this lecture.

The Revolution which began in a dream of the Golden Age ended in the Reign of Terror. Arising as the saviour, it became the inveterate destroyer. And this was the reason of the change-that the theories which the literary class had conceived the ignorant and brutalized lower classes carried out, and the natural result was the fury and blood of the Terror. The lower classes were ignorant and slaves; at every point of daily life they were met by the greed of the nobles, and by the

the revolutionary It seized on pro

irresponsible action of the law; tax after tax wrung from them the fruits of all their labour; and the taxes, being exacted not so much by government as by the class of the noblesse, fixed their hatred on a class with whom they had now neither political nor social ties. The government itself educated them for work they did in the Reign of Terror. perty at its own arbitrary will. All the land was by right the king's, and whenever the State wished to make a road, it drove it right through one small property after another, generally without paying a penny. Every poor proprietor, so damaged, learnt the doctrine that private property must give way, without any claim, to public interests. It was a root idea of the Revolution. Again, in the case of crimes against the State, there were exceptional tribunals; the villages were visited by night, men were carried off without a warrant and never seen again, their condemnation was done in half an hour under a mere form of trial. No man's liberty was safe from the caprice of those who had power or interest with those in power.

In this way, a taste for this sort of work was actually taught to the people-they were educated for the revolutionary tribunals. The forms of these things were given by the old régime; the Revolution added to them, says De Tocqueville, the atrocities of its genius.

With all this and its results Wordsworth was brought into contact. He touches on all the points I have mentioned in the "Prelude;" he and his friend discussed them with fiery indignation, till at last, "hatred of absolute rule where the will of one is the law of all," and where the nobles were on the side of absolute

dominion as against the people, seized on them, mingled with pity and with love for the miserable multitude. They met a hunger-bitten girl, driving her heifer through the lane in despairing solitude-""Tis against that that we are fighting," said Beaupuis in agitation; they heard a dreadful and pathetic story of two lovers, Vaudracour and Julia, where, by the monstrous law that enabled a father's tyranny to imprison a son, the man was driven to fatal crime, and both man and woman to hopeless misery. Seeing these things the two friends were thrown into passionate opposition, and into as passionate hopes that at least the time was come when

Captivity by mandate without law

Should cease; and open accusation lead
To sentence in the hearing of the world,

And open punishment, if not the air

Be free to breathe in, and the heart of man
Dread nothing.

More even than this negative hope they dreamed—

II with him believed

That a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty

Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil :
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,
Whether by edict of the one or few;

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In framing their own laws; whence better days

To all mankind.

When Beaupuis left him and afterwards "perished in