most gracious and divine of all creatures, a patrician-patriot, a people-loving aristocrat. But we must find room for Wordsworth's own exquisite description of this exquisite soul.

"A meeker man

Than this lived never, nor a more benign,
Meek though enthusiastic. Injuries
Made him more gracious, and his nature then
Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,
Like aromatic flowers on Alpine turf,
When foot hath crushed them.

He thro' the events

Of that great change wandered in perfect faith
As through a book, or old romance, or tale
Of Fairy, or some dream of actions wrought
Behind the summer-clouds. By birth he ranked
With the most noble, but unto the poor
Among mankind he was in service bound,
As by some tie invisible, oaths professed
To a religious order. Man he loved
As man; and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension; but did rather seem
A passion and a gallantry, like that
Which he, a soldier, in his idler days
Had paid to woman.'

With this exquisite creature, who fell defending France against the insurgent Vendeans, the young Englishman discoursed, and glowed, and aspired. He caught his friend's enthusiasm. Like him, he hoped all things and believed all things, cast his soul into the mighty time, and hailed the New Birth and loved the sublime Revolution with a passion possible to great poets alone. The fire which burned so mightily in the heart of France, fully inflamed at last her young visitor. Her hope, her rapture, her enthusiasm, became his hope, his rapture, his enthusiasm. At last had dawned the Golden Age, at last was vouchsafed the vision of the Latter Days. France was divinely renewed; the old, withered, world was young again. And the young poet, the young soul open to all divine visitings, to all hope, and to all love-how was he lost in delight; how the splendour burst upon him! how

did the radiance of Liberty circumfuse him; the joy and glory of France wrapped him round like a robe. His own life was lost in the life of a mighty nation, or rather came forth enlarged and glorified from the embrace. France was free, France was regenerate; the world would be delivered; the world would be renewed.

For a young poet, for a mighty lover of men, what a sweet surprise, what a divine vision, what a sublime intoxication!

"O pleasant exercise of hope and joy !

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O times
In which the meagre, stale forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress-to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole Earth,
The beauty wore of promise-that which sets
(As at some moments might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of Paradise itself)

The budding rose above the rose full-blown."

Strong indeed was the hope, sublime the faith, and mighty the love, of the young Enthusiast. The Revolution grew savage: invading hosts and domestic traitors goaded France into fury; but the hope and the glory did not forsake his soul. He gazed upon the very dungeons reddened by the massacres of September, yet he did not despair. The Reign of Terror came, yet he still believed in the awful time, still aspired towards a divine Future. Robespierre fell, and hope was strong in his heart. No darkness of the hour could dim his unquenchable faith; no frenzy of the people could prevail against his unconquerable love.

He returned to England about the end of 1792. But now darker and more terrible passions leagued themselves with all this beautiful faith and transcendent love. The English Government assailed the young Republic; Eng

land joined the confederate despots in their unholy warfare against France.

"What then were my emotions, when in arms

Britain put forth her free-born strength in league,
O pity and shame! with those confederate Powers!
Not in my single self alone I found,

But in the minds of all ingenuous youth,
Change and subversion from that hour. No shock
Given to my moral nature had I known
Down to that very moment; neither lapse
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named
A revolution, save at this one time;
All else was progress on the self-same path
On which with a diversity of pace

I had been travelling: this a stride at once
Into another region.'

England lifted her arm against the hopes of the world; England became hateful to the enthusiast. His country leagued herself with the enemies of mankind; the patriot disappeared in the lover of humanity. He rejoiced with all his soul when Englishmen fell by thousands before the impregnable lines of Dunkirk, and in Holland fled in shameful rout before the victorious Republicans. When men knelt in Church to return thanks for a naval victory, he sate silent and apart in gloomy wrath, invoked shame and woe upon his country, and "fed on the day of vengeance yet to come." He rejoiced with a noble joy, with a joy our own heart shares, in the rout of the Despots, and the deliverance of France.

"The Invaders fared as they deserved ! The Herculean Commonwealth had put forth her arms, And throttled with an Infant Godhead's might

The snakes about her cradle: that was well

And as it should be; yet no cure for them

Whose souls were sick, with thought of what would be
Hereafter brought in charge against mankind."

This wrath at his dishonoured country, this sorrow at the blackening of the world's hope in France, combined to sour, pervert and agonize his whole nature. Gloom beset his days, sleep forsook his nights, he took refuge from

disappointed hopes and baffled aspirations in wild theories, and extravagant schemes; he sought to eradicate all feeling, and live in pure Reason alone; he tried all things, doubted of all things, and grew weary of all things.

Books Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh of the "Prelude,” recount these tremendous workings of the French Revolution on the soul of the young poet. Such intense living in a nation's life, such awful sympathy with the rapture and agony of the world, may seem to some extravagant and impossible. But we know that this experience of Wordsworth is not solitary; he had partakers of his passion, sharers of his strange joys and woes. His own time did not refuse him that consolation. He lived on to 1848-lived to behold another uprising of the nations, another dawning of the Golden Age, another vision of the latter days, and to behold it probably with almost indifferent eyes. Yet at that very time hearts were throbbing with the world's enkindled heart, as earnestly and passionately and wildly as his own young heart had done. The dawn of 1848, the late uprising of the nations, this flaming forth of the world's heart, the fire whereof is yet scarcely cold, surely awakened in some souls hope almost as impetuous, joy almost as intense, faith almost as sublime, and passion almost as burning and unquenchable, as that which filled the spirit of Wordsworth. There were those to whom the period from February to June 1848 was one sublime and self-forgetful joy, one growing rapture, one song of triumph, one overflowing fulness of bliss. "Blessed are our eyes that they see, and our ears that they hear," was their perpetual thought, their frequent cry. As nation after nation rose, their joy mounted: they were indeed fond, fanatical lovers, whose souls had but one feeling, whose tongues had but one theme.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven."

The bloody days of June came; and Austria prevailed over Italy: yet they did not despair; they still believed; they still aspired;-as this nation fell, as that turned recreant, they concentrated the whole force of their hope, their passion and their love, upon the horribly aggrieved and sublimely uprisen people of Hungary. The vision of invaded, wasted,

struggling, magnanimous and heroic Hungary, filled their eyes, and absorbed their whole power of thought and feeling: they lived in her life, strove in her struggle, triumphed in her triumphs, wrapped her glory around them, sorrowed at her downfall, and wept her tears-felt their world darkened by the extinction of her light and their portion lessened by the ruin of her cause. But this was not their only woe. France deceived them as she had deceived Wordsworth and their other predecessors-not by excesses in behalf of liberty, but by treachery to its sacred cause. If she did not sin so terribly as of old, she sinned more vilely. She did not wax savage; she turned traitor. Invaders there were none for her to smite; she did not slaughter internal foes, but she fell upon a people that loved her, a Republic that trod in her steps. France leagued herself with the oppressors of Italy, the assailants of Rome: the mighty state attacked the weakling; the parent slew the child. This was a sorrow deep as Wordsworth ever endured, a sin dire as Wordsworth ever execrated.

But if the enthusiasts of our day have been called upon to endure as sharp a grief as their great predecessor, they have consolations altogether denied to him. The bitterness of his woe arose from the excesses of the nation which had inaugurated the Golden Age, and the deadly warfare of his own country against the cause of freedom and the hopes of the world. Noble, earnest, loving Englishmen of our day have not been called upon to hate England and to curse their country. At worst England has been inactive. If her arm was holden back from the service of freedom it was not sacrilegiously lifted up against the majesty of liberty. She loved and pitied Rome; her whole heart and soul went with Hungary. She ought to have done much more; still she is comparatively sinless; and her most generous and high-souled children have no occasion to curse her. They are better off than Wordsworth in another respect. France has deceived them, as she disappointed him. But other uprisen nations have done divinely, have demeaned themselves most nobly and gloriously. Italy did not fall without dignity. Venice put on once more her old self-devotion, and won another bright page in the book of history. A glory sat upon Republican CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 51.

K