dled actions of the French
Revolutionists, quickly cooled off their ardor, and as Taine cleverly
puts it, "at the end of a few years, the three, brought back into the
pale of State and Church, were, Coleridge, a Pittite journalist,
Wordsworth, a distributor of stamps, and Southey, poet-laureate; all
converted zealots, decided Anglicans, and intolerant conservatives." The
"handful of silver" for which the patriot in the poem is supposed to
have left the cause included besides the post of "distributor of
stamps," given to him by Lord Lonsdale in 1813, a pension of three
hundred pounds a year in 1842, and the poet-laureateship in 1843.

The first of these offices was received so long after the cooling of
Wordsworth's "Revolution" ardors which the events of 1793 had brought
about that it can scarcely be said to have influenced his change of
mind.

It was during Wordsworth's residence in France, from November 1791 to
December 1792, that his enthusiasm for the French Revolution reached
white heat. How the change was wrought in his feelings is shown with
much penetration and sympathy by Edward Dowden in his "French Revolution
and English Literature." "When war between France and England was
declared Wordsworth's nature underwent the most violent strain it had
ever experienced. He loved his native land yet he could wish for nothing
but disaster to her arms. As the days passed he found it more and more
difficult to sustain his faith in the Revolution. First, he abandoned
belief in the leaders but he still trusted to the people, then the
people seemed to have grown insane with the intoxication of blood. He
was driven back from his defense of the Revolution, in its historical
development, to a bare faith in the abstract idea. He clung to theories,
the free and joyous movement of his sympathies ceased; opinions stifled
the spontaneous life of the spirit, these opinions were tested and
retested by the intellect, till, in the end, exhausted by inward
debate, he yielded up moral questions in despair ... by process of
the understanding alone Wordsworth could attain no vital body of
truth. Rather he felt that things of far more worth than political
opinions--natural instincts, sympathies, passions, intuitions--were
being disintegrated or denaturalized. Wordsworth began to suspect the
analytic intellect as a source of moral wisdom. In place of humanitarian
dreams came a deep interest in the joys and sorrows of individual men
and women;