ing the Lernean snakes of that unhappy nation; curbing the ambition of the young Corsican, whose eye of fire in such a case we can conceive resting with very boding meaning on the young Englishman-Lo! the whole course of events changed, and all History to begin over again. A piece of very pretty dreaming this-never fortunately attempted to be realized; for Ah! how different if the attempt had been made, can we not see would have been the destiny of the young dreamer, entangled among deeds and actors he must have abhorred -his purity and magnanimity soon attracting the feline glance of Robespierre-the glory and the freshness of his youth consumed in the attempt most vain and impossible, to save a nation not capable of its own salvation. An Angel descending to do the work of a hangman— a poor Bird of Paradise rustling and soiling its beautiful plumes in the smoke and pestilence of a loathsome city, or beaten down to Earth by hurricanes and tornadoes; its very wings so gorgeous and lovely, proving impediments to its flight. No, we cannot contemplate Wordsworth there, and in that case it could only have ended in his martyrdom, and in our loss of all those thoughts and words with which he has enriched our language.

We ought not to leave Paris without saying two or three words upon the friend of our poet, Beaupuis the Republican General, with whom he spent so much of his time in France; for whose memory he has twined laurels so graceful in the Prelude-but we know but little of him; the portrait sketched by De Quincey

in his Lake Reminiscences is substantially Wordsworth's, and adds nothing at all to the stock of our information; but his influence over the mind of our poet was considerable; he was however a Chevalier, like Bayard-a patriot like Hampden; he had the high refinements of scholarship and of humanity, and Wordsworth demands for him, unknown as he is, a place near the worthiest of antiquity. He was the Dion of France, and on the banks of the Loire he held such discourse with the high-hearted and hopeful English youth as

"Under attic shades

Did Dion hold with Plato."

If the Portrait in the Prelude may be trusted, then this unknown hero must stand before us transcendently above the noblest and best of the victims of that fearful Sacrament of Atheism, and Carnival of mistaken men and demons-Vergniaud and Isnard, and St. Just, look pale by his side, because he added to the glory of high poetic and political abstractions, the service and sacrifice of a heart faithful to truth and to God, and therefore in the highest sense faithful and true to man. Such a man could only bloom like a rose in a red hot iron crown, soon to be scorched and withered before the fiery breath of wild anarchy. The cruel, glaring, eyes of the leaders of the Mountain had fixed on both him and Wordsworth as new victims-as, in fact, English spies. He had no business there, except a momentary work, that of showing that the exalted heart may sanctify the most rude and virulent violence, and lift to nobility

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the dark actions of stormy and passionate self-seeking men. We may quote the eloquent words of De Quincey, which are the best epitaph and monument after the words, in the fourth book of the Prelude, to his memory.

"This great season," says that elegant writer, "of public trial had searched men's natures, revealed their real hearts; brought into life and action qualities of writers not suspected by their possessors; and had thrown man as in alternating states of society, each upon his own native resources, unaided by the old conventional forms of rank and birth. Beaupuis had shone to unusual advantage under this general trial. He had discovered, even to the philosophic eye of Wordsworth, a depth of benignity very unusual in a Frenchman; and not of local, contracted benignity, but of large, illimitable, apostolic devotion to the service of the poor and the oppressed;-a fact the more remarkable, as he had all the pretensions, in his own person, of high birth, and high rank; and, so far as he had any personal interest embarked in the struggle, should have allied himself to the aristocracy. But of selfishness in any shape, he had no vestiges; or if he had, it shewed itself in a slight tinge of vanity; yet no-it was not vanity, but a radiant quickness of sympathy with the eye which expressed admiring love-sole relic of the chivalrous devotion once limited to the service of the ladies. Now again he put on the garb of chivalry; it was a chivalry the noblest in the world, which opened his ear to the Pariah and the oppressed all over his mis-organized coun

try. A more apostolic fervour of holy zealotry in this great cause has not been seen since the days of Bartholomew Las Casas, who shewed the same excess of feeling in another direction. This sublime dedication of his being to a cause which in his conception of it, extinguished all petty considerations for himself, and made him thenceforward a creature of the national will,-'a son of France,' in a more eminent and lofty sense than according to the heraldry of Europe-had extinguished his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour: 'injuries' says Wordsworth

-'injuries

Made him more gracious.'

And so utterly had he submitted his own will, or separate interests, to the transcendant voice of his country, which, in the main, he believed to be now speaking authentically for the first time since the foundation of Christendom, that, even against the motions of his own heart, he adopted the hatreds of the young Republic, growing cruel in his purposes towards the ancient oppressors, out of very excess of love for the oppressed; and against the voice of his own order, as well as in stern oblivion of every early friendship, he became the champion of democracy in the struggle everywhere commencing with prejudice, or feudal privileges. Nay, he went so far upon the line of this new crusade against the evils of the world, that he even accepted-with a conscientious defiance of his own inevitable homage to the erring spirit of loyalty embarked upon that cause

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."

We

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. 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