ied out.
Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their
Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge
repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's philosophy. See Cestre, La
Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.]
They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they
gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French
philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception
in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their
due place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his
Godwinian phase as that of

A proud and most presumptuous confidence
In the transcendent wisdom of the age
And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]

He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet Southey,
reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe in social
Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Shelley, writing in 1811,
says that Southey "looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected
and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind" (Dowden, Life of
Shelley, i. p. 212). Compare below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to
be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church,
but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding
impression.

While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a
child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life
he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's daughter he
was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says
that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon," but Shelley
never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the
regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first
imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was
behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and
more ambitious poems of his maturer years. The city of gold, of the
Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future society, and he describes that
poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a
thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives,
among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the
age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes:
[Footnote: Dowden,