WORDSWORTH'S MENTAL STATE. 79 a commission in the Republican armies preparing to move against La Vendee; and finally in that cause, as commander-in-chief, he laid down his life." Reverting again to these miseries of life felt by the poet to the extent to which he could feel; no doubt his residence in France, and the disappointments of those days and hours contributed-for as yet his mind was not buoyed up and sustained by those correctives to despondency which at a later period were all his own. We think that his nephew writes too much by the rote and the rule when he says "His feelings at the dawn of the French Revolution have been described. We have seen also the distress into which he was thrown by the savage acts that polluted a cause which he regarded as the cause of heaven. His mind was whirled round and round in a vortex of doubt, and appeared to be almost on the point of sinking into a gulf of despair; not that he ever lapsed into scepticism-no! his early education, his love of the glories and beauties of creation protected him from any approach to that; yet at this period of his life his religious opinions were not very clearly defined. He had too high an opinion of the sufficiency of the human will, and too sanguine a hope of unlimited benefits to be conferred on society by the human intellect. He had a good deal of stoical pride, mingled with not a little of pelagian self-confidence. Having an inadequate perception of the necessity of divine grace, he placed his hopes where they could not stand; and did not place them where, if placed, they could not fall. He sought for ideal perfectibility where 80 THE EVERLASTING NO. he could not but meet with real frailty, and did not look for peace where alone it could be found. Hence his mind was ill at ease.' It is to this period that reference is made in those books of the Prelude entitled "Imagination and Taste, how lost and repaired." And indeed it is the Synopsis of human history. Thus it is that by disappointment and loss of faith in man, all who have trusted, break from the Anchorage of Faith; the only difference being that to some the disappointment arises from one cause, and some from another. Simple natures know nothing of those terrible tempests which shake the souls capable of more profound observation, more extensive survey, and deeper feelings; but what matters that; the destruction of the ant-hill is to the ant as important a matter as is the destruction of a kingdom to men. The bird that returns to its brake and finds its nest gone, is as much cast forth from all rest as the poor villagers visited by the earthquake; shall we debate who are the noblest natures? those who feel through their hearts in dreary misanthropic moods, the rent of their nature from their kind; or those on whom all the voices of the storms of Revolution make their appeal in vain. The disappointments which shake our trust, sometimes result from the rending of our affections, and sometimes our faith in man. Wordsworth had evidently indulged in a very sanguine dream of human excellence and greatness; and he was perhaps especially inclined • Life, 89. THE EVERLASTING NO. 81 to regard those with respect who founded all their speeches and exertions in boasted love to, and belief in He visited them at home to be disenchanted; he very affectingly describes his feelings at the time of the breaking out of the French Revolution "I brought with me the faith, That if France prospered, good men would not long He expected an universal triumph of goodness—an inauguration of virtue, justice, and truth. He met with a two-fold cause of sorrow,* but one of his most especial sources of grief was that England allied herself with the confederacy of Europe to crush the liberties of France. To him at that moment England seemed recreant to herself-seemed to him to depart from the central principle of her History and her Being "No shock Given to my moral nature had I known 82 THE EVERLASTING NO. Of my beloved Country. Wishing not All have to undergo some great grief in life-many a far more close and severe grief than that which assailed our poet. Compared with those conflicts which many hearts have to bear and endure, his will seem indeed trifling. Still it was a mighty grief, no less than the reeling and splitting of a world, and the shaking foundations that seemed to stand firm and venerable beneath the feet-only, the cracking of the world is not so grave a matter to a man as the cracking of the heart, and the one is much more easily mended than the other. These rendings of heart or world too tend to harden, and to give substance to the mental nature, they strengthen, and when the spirit has recovered the shock they renew. A man has no very firm foundation who has not had, two or three times, his structure on the sand washed away; on the whole, have we not to say that great disappointments are among our best educators; they send away some pleasant illusions; let in some beams of light, painful it may be to the eye, but these illusions are illusions, and light is light, and it is by passing through the one, and gratefully receiving the other, that we are admitted to the true reality of things. CHAPTER IV. THE POET AND HIS SISTER. "Under yon orchard in yon humble cot, Oh if such silence be not thanks to God For what hath been bestowed, then where, where then Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts THE RECLUSE. "Woman with looks that can charm and enchain SCHILLER. Up to this period the Poet had been for the most part a solitary, and perhaps not a very happy, wanderer |