III. His descriptions. The theatre. Parliament. Fashion- Wordsworth in England. His Republicanism I. English feeling towards France in 1792-3. Growth II. Wordsworth defends the Revolution in a letter to Watson III. The declaration of war. France. His hatred of Pitt V. His hope revives with the death of Robespierre I. At first Wordsworth has hopes of the speedy advent II. Undeceived, he takes refuge in abstract thought. Becomes a disciple of Godwin. Conception of of Dorothy Wordsworth. Her influence over her IV. Their life at Racedown. Under the helpful influence V. He recovers his sympathy for man as he is. His I. Coleridge before 1796. His character and youth PAGE II. Happy life of Wordsworth and Coleridge at Alfoxden. They are, however, suspected and watched III. Invasion of Switzerland by the French. Indignation of Coleridge. His patriotism revives. Words- worth finds consolation in Nature, and is confirmed Book in I. It is not due to circumstances II. It is not due to temperament alone. III. It springs principally from the will, and from faith in Wordsworth's Relation to Science I. He condemns science as it is, as responsible for pessimism. His comparative contempt for reason- ing, and search for other means of investigating II. The science of the future. The manner in which a psychologist. The true sphere of the poet lies in 403+ PAGE I. Attempts of Wordsworth and Coleridge at collabora- II. Imagination and Fancy. Wordsworth's contempt II. The senses, which are its organs, are divine. The Prefatory Note Being an Extract from an Article by Mr LESLIE STEPHEN in the “National Review,” reprinted by kind permission of the Editor. M. Émile LegoUIS has written a singularly interesting study of Wordsworth's youth. Of M. Legouis' general qualifications, it need only be said that he has a thorough knowledge of English literature, and a minute acquaintance with all the special literature bearing upon Wordsworth's early career. He fully appreciates the qualities which, though they have endeared Wordsworth's poetry to his own countrymen, have hardly made him one of the cosmopolitan poets. M. Legouis' study is concerned with one stage in Wordsworth's development. Wordsworth was in France at the crisis of the revolution, and there, as we know from The Prelude, became the enthusiastic admirer of Michel Beaupuy, afterwards a general and an incarnation of republican virtue. Wordsworth compares him to Dion as the philosophic assailant of a tyrant.1 M. Legouis has already given an account of Beaupuy,2 and has now pointed out the nature of his influence upon his young English disciple. Browning's Lost Leader represented a view of Wordsworth which seemed strange to most readers. The name of Wordsworth had come to suggest belief in the thirtynine articles, capital punishment, and rotten boroughs. 1 See Wordsworth's poem upon " Dion," written 1816. 2 Le Général Michel Beaupuy, par G. Bussière et Émile Legouis. Paris, 1891 |