insinuating that you have partaken of Mr Burke's intoxicating bowl. They will content themselves-shaking their heads as you stagger along with remarking that you have business on both sides of the road."

And yet Wordsworth himself had business, and very important business, "on both sides of the road." He was already far more eclectic in politics, and in literary art, than he knew.

This remarkable letter to the Bishop of Landaff casts a great deal of light, however, on the evolution of his character. I do not think it has received the attention it deserves, while its ability would almost warrant its revival by the advocates of "home rule"! It would not, however, by itself, be a true reflection of the opinion and sympathies of the writer. We have seen how much his life at Hawkshead was a communal life, how in Cambridge he lived in a sort of republic, how foreign travel with Jones, and subsequent residence alone in France, developed the socialistic side of his nature; but it was by intuition that he grasped the meaning of the Revolution, and appreciated its significance,-piercing to what lay beneath it, and was elemental to man; and, with all its ability and subtlety, its political eloquence and inward fire, there is a strain of "apology" in that letter to the Bishop that is prophetic of reaction about to be.

There were two streams of tendency flowing side by side, and at work together, in that wondrous movement of 1792, the one a purely democratic movement, that turned for support to the primal nature and the personal "rights of man," and could therefore ally itself easily with a stream of as pure and thorough conservatism as the world has ever known. The other was a spirit of reactionary uprise against order, of blind wrath and antagonism to those fundamental differences in humanity, which had by time been evolved, and which are at all times radical and inevitable. With the former, Wordsworth had the fullest sympathy; with the

latter, he had none. But when he tried to vindicate the Revolution in France, by the arguments advanced in this letter, he was drawn for a time unconsciously aside, by the magnetic spell of a tendency which he at heart abjured.

A reaction soon set in, and this the subsequent course of events in France itself determined. It came at first as a shock, and then as a terrible blow to Wordsworth, that the promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the movement should issue in tyranny, diversity, and hate. He seems to have endured the pain of this reaction to a large extent in silence. He did not write it down, as he recorded his sympathy with the former movement. But there is no doubt that, during the first year of his return to England, the great problems of the rights of man, of political freedom, of the moral government of the world, and of human destiny haunted him; and he underwent a struggle in regard to them. We shall see how he emerged from this struggle, how his experience of "despondency" was followed by one of despondency corrected," and how the influence of his sister especially helped him.

The

Two things, however, are to be noted at this stage. first may perhaps explain Wordsworth's outburst of indignation in this letter to the Bishop of Landaff. It was the action of England, after the murder of the French King in January 1793, in preparing for war with France, that chiefly roused him. The idea of his own country joining with others to suppress the now insurgent cry for liberty in Europe, and taking the side of the oppressor and the tyrant, fired him with indignation. The second is that it was the action of France, in the day of its newly found freedom, becoming unjust and oppressive towards Switzerland, the old home and bulwark of the liberties of Europe, that disillusionized him, shewing him that the very grossest tyranny might be practised under the specious name of liberty, and

that the very champions of democracy, in levelling all distinctions, might be neither true sons of France, nor genuine citizens of the world, nor friends of the human race.

*

The disappointment he underwent was, in the truest sense, an education to him. It shewed him the intellectual and moral root of the illusion, that had blinded his eye for a time, when France seemed to be

and when he wrote of it

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young, was heaven.”

To see the illusion that lay within the brilliant promise of that time, and yet to be made neither wildly reactionary in opinion, nor reckless in act, nor disconsolate and hopeless of the future,-in this Wordsworth stands in marked contrast with many of his contemporaries. One great lesson it taught him, more than it taught any of the rest, viz. this, how out of evil good may come, and be more signally evolved because of the disasters that have preceded it. It is one of the ideas with which his later poems are full, that the loftiest good, alike to the individual and to the race, is being constantly developed out of the most terrible disaster, by a process hidden to our eyes, yet verifiable both in personal and in national experience. We owe a great deal of this later teaching to the experience which Wordsworth passed through, in France in 1792, and in England in 1793.

It must also be remembered that what Wordsworth sympathized with-while in France, and on his return-was rather the wave of national enthusiasm, the glad uprise of the suppressed instinct of freedom, and its outcome,

"Joy in widest commonalty spread,"

* Compare the Thanksgiving Ode, the Invocation to the Earth, &c., all the sonnets dedicated to Liberty.

and

than any intellectual doctrine as to "the rights of man," the formulated creed of the democracy. It was because he saw, (or thought he saw), by intuition, that the Central Heart of the universe beats in sympathy with the joy of each separate human heart, and reveals itself thus, that he sympathized with the movement to which he was a temporary convert; and this remained with him—this faith in the destiny of the individual, and of the race-when his "defection" from republicanism was pronounced. The truth is, Wordsworth never sympathized with the formal or rational " system of democratic thought. He seized the movement, or rather a fragment of it, by intuition; and he partly idealized its other sides, with which-presented in prosaic literalness—— he had no sympathy. And when, to attain an end with which he sympathized, dubious means, or means unrighteous, were adopted and defended,-when, e.g., the Revolution swept before it not only the evils of the past, but the barriers against evil in the present, and created new ones of its own, his vivid emotional sympathy with it received a check, and finally died away. The truth is, that Wordsworth became a radical at the most susceptible age, and ceased to be one at the age when conviction usually takes deepest root. The consequence is that, in his maturer poems, we have such a sympathy with democratic aspirations, as every wise conservative will endorse; tempered by such an aversion to its revolutionary outcome, as every wise liberal must hail. The "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty" are amongst his very finest, but it is easy to see how the author of these Sonnets could afterwards write the Thanksgiving Ode.

Special interest attaches to the change in Wordsworth's attitude towards the French Revolution, from the references made to it, first by a contemporary, and then by a subsequent poet, by Shelley and by Browning.

Shelley addressed a Sonnet to Wordsworth, in which,

2

-referring to the lament in the Ode on Immortality that things pass away never to return-he applies it thus:

"Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude,
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to Truth and Liberty.
Deserting them, thou leaveth me to grieve,

Thus, having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."

And Browning wrote, in his lyric on The Lost Leader :

"We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,

Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves.
He alone breaks from the van and the freedmen,

He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!"

He laments, in the second stanza, that this wonderful "sinking to the rear," and identifying himself with the radical interests and aspirations of mankind, had ceasedwith this result that a new wrong had been done to the human race. Browning had been often asked who "the Lost Leader was, and in a letter to the editor of the Prose Works of Wordsworth, he says that in his youth he did "use the great and venerated personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter's model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account; had I intended more, above all such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.' Therefore he could not allow his picture of the "change of politics in the great poet"-while he considered that defection an event to be deplored to be "the vera effigies of such a moral and intellectual superiority."

The late Baron Field-in an unpublished sketch of