and heartless look was knitting for her bread. Pointing to her, Beaupois said with vehemence, 'It is against that we are fighting.' As they two wandered about the old forests around the city, they eagerly discussed, both the great events that were crowding on each other, and also those abstract questions about civil government, and man's natural rights, which the times naturally suggested. Wordsworth owns that he threw himself headlong into those questions without the needful preparation, knowing little of the past history of France and of her institutions, and wholly unversed in political philosophy. He only saw that the best ought to rule and that they don't. In his boyhood, he says, he had lived among plain people, had never seen the face of a titled man, had therefore no respect for, nor belief in, such. He therefore now became a patriot and republican, determined that kings and aristocracies should cease, and longed for a government of equal rights and individual worth, whatever that may mean. In the days that were coming, abject poverty was to disappear, equality was to bring in a golden time of happiness and virtue. After some months, spent together in sharing dreams like these, they parted, Wordsworth for Blois, and then for the fierce metropolis; Beaupois to perish ere long

'Fighting in supreme cominand

Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire.'

When, in the autumn of 1792, Wordsworth came from Blois to Paris, the September massacre had taken place but a month before; the king and his

family were in prison; the Republic was proclaimed, and Robespierre in power. The young Englishman ranged through the city, passed by the prison where the king lay, visited the Tuileries, lately stormed, and the Place de Carrousel, a month since heaped with dead. As he lay in the garret of a hotel hard by, sleepless, and filled with thoughts of what had just taken place, he seemed to hear a voice that cried aloud to the whole city, 'Sleep no more.' Years after, those scenes still troubled him in dreams. He had ghastly visions of scaffolds hung with innocent victims, or of crowds ready for butchery, and mad with the levity of despair. In his sleep he seemed to be pleading in vain for the life of friends, or for his own, before a savage tribunal. A page of 'The Prelude' is filled with the somewhat vague reflections that came to him as he lay sleepless in his garret. The most definite of these is, that a nation's destiny often hangs on the action of single persons, and that the bonds of one common humanity tranThese vague

scend those of country and race. truisms Lockhart, glad no doubt to make the young republican poet look ridiculous, condenses into this: 'He revolved in his mind how the crisis might be averted, and, taking the measure of himself and of the various factions, he came to the conclusion that he, William Wordsworth, was the proper person to rally the nation and conduct the revolution to a

happy issue.' What authority for this interpretation Lockhart had, except his wish to ridicule Wordsworth, it is not easy to guess. But just at

this crisis, when the young poet, whatever line he had taken, was in imminent danger of falling along with his friends, the Brissotins, in the then impending massacres of May, he was forced-by what he then thought a harsh necessity, but afterwards owned to be a gracious providence to return to England. Lockhart suggests that his friends at home, becoming aware of the peril he was in, prudently recalled him by stopping the supplies.

Returning to England at the close of 1792, he spent some time in London in great unsettlement and mental perplexity. He was horrified with the excesses in which the Revolution had landed, yet not the less he clung to his republican faith, and his hope of the revolutionary cause. When at length Britain interposed, his indignation knew no bounds; this step, he said, was the first great shock his moral nature received. With an evil eye, he watched, off the Isle of Wight, the fleet that was to transport our armies to the Continent,-heard of the disasters of our arms with joy, and of our success with bitterness. When every month brought tidings of fresh enormities in France, and opponents taunted him with these results of equality and popular government, he retorted that these were but the overflow of a reservoir of guilt, which had been filling up for centuries by the wrongdoings of kings and nobles. Soon France entered on a war of conquest, and he was doomed to see his last hopes of liberty betrayed. Still striving to hide the wounds of mortified presumption, he clung, as he tells us, more firmly than

ever to his old tenets, while the friends of old institutions goaded him still further by their triumphant scorn. Overwhelmed with shame and despondency at the shipwreck of his golden dreams, he turned to probe the foundations on which all society rests. Not only institutions, customs, law, but even the grounds of moral obligation and distinctions of right and wrong, disappeared. Demanding formal proof, and finding none, he abandoned moral questions in despair. This was the crisis of his malady.

6

The nether gloom into which he was plunged, and the steps by which he won his way back to upper air, are set forth in the concluding Books of 'The Prelude,' and are partly described in the character of the Solitary in The Excursion.' These selfdescriptions, though somewhat vague, are yet well worth attention, for the light they throw on Wordsworth's own mental history, and as illustrating by what exceptional methods one of the greatest minds of that time was floated clear of the common wreck in which so many were entangled. His moral being had received such a shock that, both as regards man and nature, he tried to close his heart against the sources of his former strength. The whole past of history, he believed, was one great mistake, and the best hope for the human race was to cut itself off for ever from all sympathy with it. Even the highest creations of the old poets lost their charm for him. They seemed to him mere products of passion and prejudice, wanting altogether in the nobility of reason. He tried by narrow syllogisms, he tells us, to unsoul

those mysteries of being which have been through all ages the bonds of man's brotherhood. This is rather vague; but perhaps we are not wrong in supposing it to mean that he grew sceptical of all those higher faiths which cannot be demonstrably proved. This moral state reacted on his feelings about the visible universe. It became to him less spiritual than it used to be. Turning on it the same microscopic, unimaginative eye which he had turned on the moral world, he learnt, by an evil infection of the time, alien to his own nature, to compare scene with scene, to search for mere novelties of form and colour, dead to the moral power and the sentiment that resides in each individual place. He fell for a time under a painful tyranny of the eye, that craves ever new combinations of form, uncounteracted by the reports of the other senses, uninformed by that finer influence that streams from the soul into the eye.

In this sickness of the soul, this 'obscuration of the master vision,' his sole sister Dorothy came, like his better angel, to his side. Convinced that his office on earth was to be a poet, not to break his heart against the hard problems of politics and philosophy, she led him away from perplexing theories and crowded cities into the open air of heaven. Together they visited, travelling on foot, many of the most interesting districts of their native England, and mingled freely with the country people and the poor. There, amid the freshness of nature, his fevered spirit was cooled down, earth's first diviner influence' returned, he saw things again as he had