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A CRISIS IN HIS HISTORY.

sea of horrors rolled and tossed, and heaved around him, but he has only noted the generalization of the picture; all its details were lost on him, and are lost to us we cannot but conceive instead, Goethe there, and what an interesting addition should we have had to the Autobiography. The intense feelings of our author interest us too-the horrors robbed him of rest, for he was in Paris but a very short time-less than a month, after the September Massacres-he walked through the streets and heard the hawkers crying the denunciation of Robespierre by Louvet, but individual circumstances of the scene appear to have passed away from him, or to have been absorbed in the features of a more general portrait; so he paced the streets, no doubt visited the stormy assembly-beheld the place where now the King lay a prisoner, and eventually had to tear himself away from the scene of these vehement and contending passions lest he too should be dragged into the whirlpool, for he had formed serious thoughts of entering into the conflict; he had revolved his duty and position much; he had formed an intimacy with one of the noblest of the Girondists, Beaupuis, and often he had meditated how frequently the destiny of Man and of States hung upon single persons-the principal actors around him were young men like himself— the feeling that he was not a Frenchman was met by the recollection that humanity was one, and that in its essential unity it transcends all local divisions and distinctions; he had further meditated that his youth, his

WORDSWORTH IN THE REVOLUTION.

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weakness, his character as an alien, were all balanced by noble aspirations, by hope, by strong conviction, and by the recollection that

"A spirit thoroughly faithful with itself,

Is for Societies unreasoning herd,

A domineering instinct."

It would appear that his feelings and his reasonings at this time lay almost complete around him, inviting him to an effort to turn aside the course of the Revolution by his individual will and power. One paramount mind he argued would have abashed those impious crests, and in despite of the ignorance and corruption of the people, would have cleared a way for just government. He has given the processes and the results of these ideas which obtained so strong a hold over his mind, in the Prelude and the Excursion-for a time they were with him in his loneliness an intoxication, but the time of trial as we have seen, passed, and he returned to England, to brood over the Spectres, the Revolution had raised within him.

We have seen in the pages of one Review* in this country, some sanguine hoverings round that singular and curious possibility, Wordsworth a member of the French Assembly-Wordsworth one of the Girondists. It is very probable to our minds that he really had mingled much with their counsels. The writer we have referred to cherishes fruitful ideas and fancies touching the influence of the mind of Wordsworth on the mind

* British Quarterly.

H

of the Assembly; softening and giving stability and magnanimity to its aims and paths. We can indulge in no such dreams-it is one of those phantasmal pictures which sport before the eye with a sort of licence in fact, but which fact as speedily dispels. He was not a man of action at all-his decisions were not prompt and momentary, kindled by the exigency of the occasion, and taking power from the difficulty of the circumstance and the conflict. He was essentially a Poet

-a musing, meditative man, and among the furious devils who were engaged in tearing out each others hearts, he walked like the spirit of another and a better world. He saw, perhaps no eye in France saw so clearly as did his young eye, what was wanted there; but he had not the mailed hand, and the gauntleted will, and the remorseless nature capable of coping in that arena; and beside, Force is the mother of Force; the one can only incarnate the other, forth from that boiling sea of blood, who could be expected successfully to emerge, but the strong and wily young soldier, whose energies were perfectly equal to his will, and whose will was the ready creature of his passions and ambition.

But if the reader will construct a Romance there are the materials ready to his hand-Wordsworth leader of the Girondists-Wordsworth President of the Assembly-Wordsworth First Consul-taming the haughty spirit of the Republic; allaying its feverish thirst for blood; framing for it a Constitution; by the sovereignty of superior genius and goodness, overawing and crush

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