They did so and, as Wordsworth puts it in the Dedication of the Descriptive Sketches (inscribed to Jones), they saw "the sunsets which give such splendour to the Vale of Clwyd, Snowdon, the chair of Idris, the quiet village of Bethgelert, Menai and her druids, the Alpine steeps of the Conway, and the still more interesting windings of the wizard stream of the Dee.” * Their ascent of Snowdon is described in the fourteenth Book of The Prelude. At the summit of the mountain at the dead of night, a sea of mist around, and a hundred hills seeming to rise out of it, the moonlight overhead, and the noise of waters, of torrents and streams innumerable, mounting to them, " roaring with one voice," became to Wordsworth the emblem of a mind that feeds upon infinity. A power within Nature, moving it, and yet one within its multitudinous voices and forces, seemed to be displaying itself through outward things. As creative minds build up the greatest things from least suggestions, not subdued but only stimulated by the impressions of sense, so it seemed to him that the Omnipresent Power within nature disclosed its presence, and yet attested its supremacy. We may connect with this a familiar passage in The Excursion, beginning "Within the soul a faculty abides." + On the 3rd August he again writes to Mathews from Plas-yn-llan: "I regret much not to have been made acquainted with your wish to have employed your vacation in a pedestrian tour, both on your own account, as it would have contributed greatly to exhilarate your spirits, and on mine, as we should have gained much from the addition of your society. Such an excursion would have served like an Aurora Borealis to gild your long Lapland night of melancholy." * See vol. i. p. 287. + See vol. v. p. 188. These pedestrian tours and tentative efforts in poetic. work were delightful; but how was the young poet to maintain himself? He thought of many things. He was urged by his friend Robinson to take Orders, and it was a letter received from this friend, while he was staying at Plas-yn-llan, that led him to leave the place abruptly. On the 23rd September we again find him at Cambridge. He writes to Mathews: "I quitted Wales on a summons from Mr Robinson, a gentleman you most likely have heard me speak of, respecting my going into Orders, and taking a curacy at Harwich, which curacy he considered as introductory to the living. I thought it was best to pay my respects to him in person, to inform him that I am not of age for ordination." In the same letter he tells Mathews that he means to "remain at Cambridge till the University fills." On the 9th October 1791, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to Miss Pollard from Forncett : "My brother John is arrived in England, and, I am told, is grown a very tall handsome man. . . . Kit is entered at Trinity College, and I hope that we two meet by this time next year. William is at Cambridge . . . I know not when my brother William will go into the north; probably not so soon as he intended, as he is going to begin a new course of study, which he may perhaps not be able to go on with so well in that part of the world, as I conjecture he may find it difficult to meet with books. He is going, by the advice of my uncle William, to study the Oriental Languages." It being impossible for him to take Orders at his present age, he thought of writing for the Newspapers as a means of livelihood; but, having enough of money for a year's sojourn abroad, and being now more interested in contemporary events in France than he was when he passed through it with Jones in 1790, he resolved to spend twelve months on the Continent. He wrote to Mathews from Brighton on the 23rd November that he was on "his way to Orleans, where he proposed to pass the winter." As we have seen, his sister wrote to Miss Pollard that his object was to acquire a knowledge of French and also of Spanish, which he might perhaps turn to account subsequently as travelling tutor. The contrast between the course of Wordsworth's life hitherto, and what it became during that winter of 1791, was great. Carlyle has somewhere said, that from the silent glens of Nithsdale to the rattling whinstones of Piccadilly, is but a step. That contrast Wordsworth had already known; but, from the quiet of the Lakes and the monotony of Cambridge, he was now transferred to the rapidly-shifting scenes and the wild excitements of France, in the most stirring period of its history. His aim in crossing the channel was chiefly, as his sister tells us, to learn the language; but in addition, there is no doubt that the state of the country, and sympathy with its aspirations after liberty, "lured him forth." The readiest way to Orleans was through Paris, and there he stayed some days. He visited, in haste, "each spot of old or recent fame," the latter chiefly. He went to the National Assembly, and there heard the futile, weak, excited debates; attended the Club of the Jacobins, and In the spot where the Bastille had stood (destroyed the previous year) he sat in the sun, and gathered a stone from the rubbish, and "pocketed the relic." pocketed the relic." It was a stirring time for France: the Assembly of Senators, "effervescent, * See The Prelude, book ix., vol. iii. p. 308. well-intentioned,"* divided against itself, to-day swearing fealty to the Constitution with enthusiastic "vivats," tomorrow quarrelling over it in hatred; the king accepting the "rheumatic Constitution," † and yet unable to carry it out; in the Jacobin amphitheatre, the wild harangues of the leaders of the new "mother-society" of the world; Liberty only thought of in connection with Equality, and the levelling of all distinctions. It is somewhat curious that in the midst of these scenes Wordsworth was not much moved. He even tells us that he "affected more emotion than he felt." This was perhaps partly due to his ignorance of the nature of the movement, partly also to a dim perception that there might be another side to it, and that there was something hollow in its aims. Certainly he was not stirred by it sufficiently to induce him to remain in Paris. He pushed on to Orleans, where he wintered. There he even likened himself to a plant under glass in a greenhouse, when every bush and tree in the country was shaking to the roots. At Orleans his chief associates were a band of military officers stationed in the city, men who had but one aim, viz., to undo the mischief already done to their country. They seem to have liked Wordsworth, and welcomed him in their society. He gives us a striking account of them, in that time of universal ferment and social earthquake, when the soil of common life seemed almost "too hot to tread on," although he laughed at the bare idea of presenting an adequate picture of it to posterity. Wordsworth had never himself seen anything contrary to the order of Nature in certain men possessing rank above others. This was rather the order of Nature. His only lament had been that the best persons in the world were not * See Carlyle's French Revolution. + Carlyle. But the easy, almost the world's rulers, as they ought to be. communal life at Hawkshead, and the fraternal equality of undergraduate life at Cambridge, prepared him for sympathising with the aspirations of France at this time; and the sight of soldiers hastening along the roads near Orleans, to join the war in the frontier, in defence of what they deemed the cause of liberty, touched him to the quick. With one of this band of officers-the patriot Beaupuis― intimacy ripened into friendship. They walked many a mile in the woods around the city, and by the banks of the Loire, discussing the origin and end of government, and its best forms, the personal and social virtues, the rights of man as man, his fundamental nature and destiny-"heart-bracing colloquies" Wordsworth called them. They traversed history for ancient parallels, and applied them to the events of the hour. One day they met a poor girl in a rural lane, languid, famished, leading a lean heifer by a cord tied to her arm, and herself busy knitting with thin hands. Beaupuis turned round and said, "It is against that that we are fighting." Wordsworth told Coleridge in after years that if it was a joy to them to discuss the state of man, and question of human liberty and destiny, by the banks of their favourite Cumbrian streams, it was doubly so to do this with one who had to te an actor in the great tragedy, and to put the doctrines which he held into living deeds. In The Prelude, Wordsworth likens Beaupuis to Dion, and speaks of him as a man worthy to be associated with the noblest of ancient times. There is little doubt that it was these walks and talks with Beaupuis that stirred Wordsworth's soul so as to call out its latent republican feeling for a time. He returned to Paris much more of a radical than he left it. He desired that every law should be abolished that legalised the exclusion of any class from political privilege. He wished to see the people having "a strong hand" in the framing of their |