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he breaks into a prophecy which God has fulfilled in our own time

Fallen Power!

Thy fortunes, twice exalted, might provoke

Me to glad notes prophetic of the hour

When thou, uprisen, shalt break thy double yoke,

And enter, with prompt aid from the Most High,
On the third stage of thy great destiny.

But in the case of Italy also, taught, as he held, by the fate of France, he was against all rash schemes and popular passion. Writing about the insurrections in Bologna in 1837, he declares that by no mere fit of sudden passion is freedom won, and urges gradual progress, noiseless pains, and moderation. And the advice he gives is noble enough and characteristic of him, nor is it one which the Italians would despise. It was at the root of all Mazzini's later teaching to his people. "O, great Italian nation," Wordsworth writes,

Let thy scope

Be one fixed mind for all: thy rights approve
To thy own conscience gradually renewed;
Learn to make Time the father of wise Hope;
Then trust thy cause to the arm of Fortitude,

The light of Knowledge, and the warmth of Love.

It has seemed to me worth while, though at some length, to look into the question of Wordsworth's later Conservatism, and to show that he did not merit the violent expressions used about his change. Apostate, renegade, were terms equally unjust and unworthy to be applied to one who had done so much for Man. Still he suffered from the change. I have already said that with the decay of his natural republicanism, and with the loss of the ideas of republicanism as the leading thoughts of life,

decayed his poetical power when he spoke of man, even to a certain degree when he spoke of Nature. With their overthrow decayed also that larger Christianity in him, which is not personal, but human; but at the same time his personal Christianity grew deeper. Nor must we blame him much for this. "Twould have been better had he been as before, the Prophet of liberty and right, the declarer that the cause of man is the cause of God; but it is but natural that, as age grows on, our thoughts should centre more round the relation of God to our own soul than our relation to the world of men, that the "Evening Voluntaries" should succeed the "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty and Independence.'

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,

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