LECTURE XII.

IN my last lecture, I was carried far forward to the close of Wordsworth's life by my wish to bring under one theme his earlier and later feelings with regard to the Revolution. It is necessary now to return to his personal history, as it touches on the poetry of Man and of Nature. In doing so there will be some unavoidable repetition, but that which is repeated will be used in a different connection and for a different purpose. I have in this lecture to trace how the failure of his hopes for Man impaired his love of Nature and his love of Man; how they were restored, and, finally, how that marriage of his human mind and Nature, to which we have been looking forward for so long, was at last fulfilled.

I must, therefore, in order to arrive at the causes which impaired his love of Nature and Man, return to his personal history. We left him when he was driven by stress of circumstances from France to England in 1793. He had nearly been involved in the fate of his friends, the Brissotins, and he followed with intense eagerness the progress of affairs in France. He refused to seek the country, and remained in London. It is characteristic of him at this time, that he took but little interest in the

movement for Negro Emancipation, for he felt that if France prospered, slavery must perish. The principles there fought for, if established, would strike at the root of all oppression, and with the destruction of the root, all the branches of the tree of human slavery would be destroyed, Negro slavery among the rest.

But as he watched in passionate desire, two things deprived his watch of all delight and threw him into almost despair. The first was the union of England with the confederate powers against France; the second was the Reign of Terror. He never heard the sunset cannon from the English fleet, as he watched it riding in the Solent, ere it went to war,

Without a spirit overcast by dark
Imaginations, sense of woes to come,

Sorrow for humankind, and pain of heart.

Prelude, Book x.

It was this first threw him out of his love of Man and soured his heart. It was misery to him to sit among the worshippers who gave praise for his country's victories, "like an uninvited guest whom no one owned, to sit silent, and to brood on the day of vengeance yet to come." It was still worse to be tossed between love of England, and delight that she was beaten by her enemies because she was false to liberty: a woeful time which those who afterwards attacked Wordsworth had never gone through.

Nor did he ever cast his eyes on France without misery: misery because God seemed to have forgotten Man, because liberty seemed to have forgotten herself and to wear the robes of tyranny, because the deeds

then done would be brought in charge against her name. For years his dreams were haunted with the ghastly visions of that time; he saw the dungeons, the executions, the unjust tribunals, and in sleep he seemed to plead in long orations before their judges,

With a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,
Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt

In the last place of refuge-my own soul

Moved in this way to the very centre of his being with the passion of humanity, troubled, even tortured with conflicting emotions, he compared this new love of Man with his early love of Nature, and both in their relation to God.

His love of Nature, whose veins were filled from the fountain of the grace of God,

Was service paid to things which lie

Guarded within the bosom of God's will,

Therefore to serve was high beatitude;

Tumult was therefore gladness, and the fear

Ennobling, venerable; sleep secure,

And waking thoughts more rich than happiest dreams.
Prelude, book x,

But this new love of Man, how unspeakably unlike! With what a different ritual did one serve, through it, the Power Supreme who made man divine! Faith and calmness seemed to leave his heart when he felt how full of doubt, dismay, and sleepless trouble, how sorrowful the tumult, how dreadful were the dreams, which belonged to this new service of mankind.

Yet, as he looked deeper-and that he could do this marks the temperate courage of Wordsworth as a thinker,

and the mastery of his intellectual will over mere emotion, he saw no reason to despair of Man. As the Prophets, who in their highest inspiration worked with a human heart troubled for the woes of man, wanted not consolation in that they saw God in the punishment of evil, and the triumph of moral law; so Wordsworth saw beneath the misery of France, God in moral retribution, and God educating the nation. That was one theological aspect in which he viewed events.

He looked again, and saw another star of hope for Man in the self-sacrifice and virtues of those who suffered. He saw in a hundred instances that God had not forsaken human nature. Green spots appeared in the desert, bright islands of "fortitude, and energy, and love," of honour, faith, and sanctity,

And human nature faithful to herself,

amid the dark and stormy seas of the time. For a time he was thus kept true to his belief of God in Man, in spite of repeated shocks: his worship and his love, though dark, were touched with breaks of sunlight.

Then came to support this hope the news that Robespierre was dead. He heard it as he crossed the estuary of the Leven, and hope revived within him, more than hope-enthusiasm.

Great was my transport, deep my gratitude

To everlasting Justice, by this fiat

Made manifest. "Come now, ye golden times,"
Said I, forthpouring on those open sands

A hymn of triumph;

66 as the morning comes

From out the bosom of the night, come ye

Thus far our trust is verified."

Prelude, book x.

The world would now, he thought, go forward to righteousness and peace and liberty.

But he was still doomed to disappointment. Preserving amid the weakness of the new government his trust in the people, he found it slowly ebb away; and when Frenchmen changed "the war of self-defence for one of conquest, and lost sight of all they struggled for;" when, finally, to close her gains, a Pope

Was summoned in to crown an Emperor;

when he saw a people, that once looked to Heaven for manna,

take a lesson from the dog

Returning to his vomit,

then the crash was too great; he lost faith for a time in God, in moral right; the old miseries returned to add their weight to the new; the hopes that had risen again against the shocks he had received, died now finally; and he lost his true love of Nature, his true love of Man, or rather he lost the true foundations on which they were based. It will be my business to trace how these two affections were impaired, and how they were restored, and how, after passing through this trial, they mingled

into one.

In the account given of this mental crisis in the "Prelude," in books xi., xii., and xiii., the two subjects of the Love of Man and Nature are mingled up together as poetic emotion led him to speak of each. For the purposes of the lecture we must isolate them from each other, but it must be always remembered that they went on together, pari passu, in his mind. With regard to