The horse is taught his manage, and no star
Of wildest course but treads back his own steps;
For the spent hurricane the air provides
As fierce a successor; the tide retreats
But to return out of its hiding-place

In the great deep; all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once;
And in this way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried,
To the whole city, "sleep no more."

The trance

Fled with the voice to which it had given birth;
But vainly comments of a calmer mind
Promised soft peace and sweet forgetfulness.
The place, all hushed and silent as it was,
Appeared unfit for the repose of night,
Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.1

The Prelude records in detail only one other recollection of the ten weeks over which Wordsworth's stay in Paris at that time extended. As he passed through the still sleeping streets one morning on his way to the PalaisRoyal, there rose above the discordant clamour which fell on his ears when he entered the Arcades the shrill cry of newspaper-vendors bawling: "Denunciation of the Crimes of Maximilian Robespierre!" And a hand as prompt as the voice held out to him the speech which Louvet had pronounced the day before against the delegate from Arras, accusing him of aiming at the dictatorship, and of having organised the September massacres. Wordsworth was impressed by Louvet's boldness in coming forward alone to oppose the powerful Robespierre; but the desertion of Louvet by the other members of the Convention, and "the inglorious issue of that charge," which turned to the advantage of the accused, filled him with mistrust and gloom. It grieved him to see

That Heaven's best aid is wasted upon men
Who to themselves are false.2

These symptoms of a lack of moral fibre in the sentatives of the nation filled him with concern.

1 The Prelude, x. 49-93.

repre

2 Ibid., x. 94-1 20.

Seeing with my proper eyes

That Liberty, and Life, and Death would soon
To the remotest corners of the land

Lie in the arbitrement of those who ruled
The capital City; what was struggled for,
And by what combatants victory must be won;
The indecision on their part whose aim

Seemed best, and the straightforward path of those
Who in attack or in defence were strong
Through their impiety-my inmost soul
Was agitated; yea, I could almost

Have prayed that throughout earth upon all men,
By patient exercise of reason made
Worthy of liberty, all spirits filled

With zeal expanding in Truth's holy light,
The gift of tongues might fall, and power arrive
From the four quarters of the winds to do

For France, what without help she could not do,
A work of honour.1

With him the only question was whether the Revolution would be completed by pure means, for he was as far from any doubt as to its ultimate success "as angels are from guilt." His was no slothful dejection. He sought remedies for the evils he saw.

An insignificant stranger and obscure,

And one, moreover, little graced with power
Of eloquence even in my native speech
And all unfit for tumult or intrigue,

Yet would I at this time with willing heart
Have undertaken for a cause so great

Service however dangerous.

He reflected that the destiny of man had always hung upon

a few individuals;

that there was,
Transcendent to all local patrimony,

One nature, as there is one sun in heaven;
That objects, even as they are great, thereby
Do come within the reach of humblest eyes.

1 The Prelude, x. 123-142.

It was his conviction that a spirit of steadfast hope, early trained to noble aspirations and always faithful to itself,

Is for Society's unreasoning herd

A domineering instinct, serves at once
For way and guide, a fluent receptacle
That gathers up each petty straggling rill
And vein of water, glad to be rolled on
In safe obedience.

He held that a mind which relies upon self-restraint, on prudence, and on simplicity, is rarely baffled in its aims or betrayed by others. And he reflected, lastly, that even if the perilous enterprise should end in death and defeat, he who had defied them at the bidding of conscience would meet the reward of its approbation.

On the other hand he remembered the common-places of the schools on the weakness of tyrants and the instability of their dominion, and, like Charlotte Corday shortly afterwards, called to mind Harmodius and Aristogiton, the deliverers of Athens from the despotism of Hipparchus. The tyrant fallen, everything once more became simple. He had no doubt that a man of genius could clear a passage for a just and stable government, as did the legislators of old, in the teeth of desperate opposition from enemies without, and in spite of the ignorance of a people misled by false teaching and invested with power before it had attained maturity.1

Still brooding over these noble schemes he returned to England in December 1792, forced, as he said at a later period, by the gracious providence of Heaven, though at the time he lamented the necessity. Had it not been for lack of money, which was the probable cause of his departure, he would doubtless have associated with the Girondists, who soon fell victims to the Mountain. "I," he says,

Doubtless, I should have then made common cause
With some who perished; haply perished too,
A poor mistaken and bewildered offering,-
Should to the breast of Nature have gone back,
With all my resolutions, all my hopes,

A Poet only to myself, to men

Useless.2

1 The Prelude, x, 142-221.

2 Ibid., x. 221-236.

CHAPTER III

Wordsworth as a Republican in England

I

WORDSWORTH returned to England a "patriot of the world." Anxious to follow from a near standpoint the great drama in which he had been prevented from taking an active part, he chose to remain in London in preference to the country. Nature had surrendered the first place in his thoughts to Humanity. Poetry was, for the time, laid aside. It is true that on his return he published the Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, but his principal object in doing so was to prove to his friends and relations that, although he had gained but little credit at Cambridge, he nevertheless "could do something."1 Moreover, the former of these poems had been composed at an earlier period; while the latter, written on the banks of the Loire, concluded, as we have seen, with a tribute in praise of France, the country to which he vows lifelong affection, and with fervent hopes that the irresistible waves of Freedom may sweep away for ever those presumptuous tyrants who cry, "Thus far and no farther." In poetry, however, there was not sufficient scope for the expression of the new ideas which he had brought from beyond the Channel. His soul was full of ardour, his brain of theories. Since in Paris he had been unable to throw himself into the thick of the conflict, he was impatient to take up arms in England on behalf of progress. London itself had lately been the scene of a humanitarian campaign, conducted by Clarkson and Wilberforce against the slave-trade. Although their first effort in Parliament, in April 1791, had proved a failure, they had not lost heart,

1 Letter to Mathews. Knight, Life of Wordsworth, i. p. 91.

and were preparing to renew the struggle. It might be supposed that this reform would have attracted Wordsworth's passionate sympathy, but on the contrary he was almost indifferent to it, and was but little distressed at its unfortunate issue. To him it seemed to be a mere matter of detail on which it was useless to dwell. He had returned with the conviction

That, if France prospered, good men would not long
Pay fruitless worship to humanity,

And this most rotten branch of human shame,
Object, so seemed it, of superfluous pains,
Would fall together with its parent tree.1

But England, as he now saw it, presented a disheartening spectacle. It was very different from the country he had quitted. At the time of his departure, near the end of 1791, England, though already divided in opinion, might be considered, as a whole, favourably disposed to the French Revolution. Its attitude was doubtless no longer so unanimously sympathetic as at first. Doubtless an eloquent voice had been raised within the walls of Parliament, and in the press, to warn the English nation that it could not lend countenance to the new legislators of France without being false to its own nature and its true sentiments. But great as was the celebrity of Burke's Reflexions (1790), the sensation they made seemed at first to be overwhelmed by the numerous and vehement rejoinders of his opponents. Fox and Sheridan replied to him in Parliament. Mackintosh, then a young man, acquired a sudden reputation by attempting to refute the Reflexions in his Vindiciae Galliae (1791). Whilst Mackintosh expressed the sympathies of the Liberal Whigs for the constitutional monarchy of England, Thomas Paine prepared the English radicals to receive without alarm, and even with feelings of envy, the news that a republic had arisen in France. And between applause from the one party and cries of horror from the other, Paine's Rights of Man2 attained a notoriety which rivalled that of Burke's Reflexions.

1 The Prelude, x. 244-262.

2 The first part of The Rights of Man appeared in 1791, the second in 1792.