"The majesty proclaim Of institutes and laws hallowed by time; Upon the allegiance to which men are born." Nor did Wordsworth see and hear Burke without inspiration and gratitude. But it was not any antagonist of the Revolution, it was the Revolution itself, which forced Wordsworth to examine the intellectual basis of his republican faith. As a concrete historical movement the Revolution could not justify itself to his conscience; all the more desperately for a time he clung to republican theories; but the intellect, divorced from imagination and the vital movements of admiration, hope, and love, served with Wordsworth but to make all faiths dubious, and he underwent in consequence that spiritual crisis, terminating happily in recovery, of which the history is told in "The Prelude." It may be questioned whether Wordsworth, after he had parted with his democratic convictions and earned the name of renegade, did not retain a truer democratic sense of the dignity of manhood than is possessed by writers who deal fluently in the platitudes of fervid Republicanism, and do lip-worship to Humanity, while they exhibit in their temper and their themes all that can render humanity the reverse of worshipful. The great events in France affected Coleridge in a different manner. In the year 1800 he strenuously opposed, in the Morning Post, the adage fashionable in ministerial circles, "Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin ;" but this he did with no private and personal motive. He asserts, and the assertion was undoubtedly correct, that he had never been at any period of his life a convert to Jacobinical principles. It was in 1793, after the September massacres and the execution of the King, that Wordsworth wrote his "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff," in which he haughtily maintains the cause of the Republic. "Before 1793," said Coleridge (and Coleridge was two years younger than Wordsworth), “I clearly saw, and often enough stated in public the horrid delusion, the vile mockery of the whole affair. When some one said in my brother James's presence that I was a Jacobin, he very well observed, 'No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed Moravian!' Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole." His feelings and his imagination, Coleridge declares, did not remain unkindled in the general conflagration, "and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own." Coleridge's passionate sympathy was given to France, and when England took up arms against the Republic, he, like Wordsworth, was smitten with grief and shame. It was through a haughty ideality of youth, to which mere pain and blood-shedding seemed worthy of slight regard, that Wordsworth for a time. sustained his courage in presence of the dark facts of contemporary history. Coleridge was in possession of a philosophical doctrine, which enabled him to accept the same facts with a certain equanimity. In one of the addresses delivered at Bristol in 1795, and which formed his first prose work, the youthful apostle of the doctrine of philosophical necessity (a doctrine which he afterwards so earnestly repudiated) cautions his hearers against the danger of indulgence in the feelings even of virtuous indignation. Thinking patriots have accustomed themselves "to regard all affairs of man as a process; they never hurry, and they never pause." Vice is "the effect of error, and the offspring of surrounding circumstances; the object therefore of condolence, not of anger." 29 Coleridge, at the age of twenty-three, and while the exciting events in France were still in progress, speaks with that judicial tone, that grave benevolence, that apparent superiority to the illusions of passion, which often betoken the presence of ardent feelings resolving to justify themselves by a cultivated moderation of tone. And in truth, Coleridge lived and moved more among the abiding realities of thought, and less in the ebb and flow of the world, than at this time did Wordsworth. To Wordsworth the affairs of man did not seem a "process:" "I revolved How much the destiny of man had hung And in the inexperience of his youth it seemed to him, that possibly through himself, an insignificant stranger, yet "strong in hope, and trained to noble aspirations," with a spirit thoroughly faithful to itself, the needed direction and moving power might be found for distracted France; if this could not be, if failure were decreed against his hopes and efforts, he was prepared to accept, for the sake of France, life as a sacrifice or the sacrifice of death. Coleridge's dream of pantisocracy had just resolved itself into air, before he delivered his Bristol "Conciones ad Populum." Although in later years it may have been with a smile that he related his dream of a little society, which "in its second generation was to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and genuine refinements of European culture," at the time the designed experiment of human perfectibility was the object of earnest thought and hope. Wordsworth never regretted that his youth was one of enthusiastic ardour, of impassioned faith, although his faith and ardour subsequently took upon themselves a new and more spiritual body. And Coleridge did not find his early self worthy of that hard ridicule, which manhood too often bestows upon a youth which possesses the appropriate beauty and virtue of youth; if afterwards he smiled, the smile was like that of one who, sound and sweet in heart, sees from the calm elevation of later years the joys and fears of boy and girl lovers. Strange fancies, and as vain as strange yet to the intense interest and impassioned zeal, which called forth and strained every faculty of my intellect for the organization and defence of this scheme, I owe much of what I at present possess, my clearest insight into the nature of individual man, and my most comprehensive views of his social relations, of the true uses of trade and commerce, and how far wealth and relative power of nations promote and impede their welfare and inherent strength." That there was a real and deep continuity in the development of Coleridge's political and religious opinion may be denied by party spirit; by disinterested criticism it cannot fail to be recognized. ! While Wordsworth, rendered grave by the September massacres, remained at Blois, and Coleridge perhaps was planning his College escapade, by which a train of gunpowder was to inscribe upon the singed grass of the lawns of St John's and Trinity the words Liberty and Equality, a singular conjunction took place between the most soaring spirit among the children of Revolution, and her earthiest and ugliest urchin,-William Blake became the saviour of Tom Paine. Mr Gilchrist has related how in the quaint upper room over bookseller Johnson's little shop, met the apostles and prophets of the eighteenth-century evangel,-Dr Price and Dr. Priestley, William Godwin, whom Blake liked little, stoical Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the irascible Fuseli, false prophet of high art. The practical good sense and tact of the visionary Blake saved Paine from an English prison, and sent that "rebellious needleman," elected representative by the Pas de Calais, to take his seat in the Convention. In Blake's enormous mythology the genius of Revolution was an honoured divinity. Its historical apparition, however, although Blake hailed that apparition with enthusiasm, was less to him than its eternal essence, its "spiritual form." From a rich feeling for concrete fact like that possessed by Burke, the mind of Blake was of course as remote as was that of Godwin; but while the Revolution gave visible shape for Godwin to intellectual formulæ, apparent through the crimes and evil passions of men, it was in Blake's conception a newborn joy, incarnating an eternal reality of the imagination. A joy, and also a terror, sprung from the marriage |