fate which soon after overtook his friends the Brissotins.

As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not
less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period
of his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely
and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime
forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative
faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds
and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside
histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage.
In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was
a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the
Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and
he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of
a national emotion. He sympathized with the hopes of France and of
mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his
faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he
only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his
reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and
above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been
recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable
that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always
compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary
leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever
was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in
religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who
does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the
grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and
virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal
liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make men better
by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make
them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that
these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can
permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics
were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes
and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events.

The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was
complete soon