senchanted by the excesses and
follies of the first French revolution, his hopes and sympathies
associated themselves ardently with the new order of things created by
it; and I have heard him say that he did not know how any
generous-minded _young_ man, entering on life at the time of that great
uprising, could have escaped the illusion. To the end his sympathies
were ever with the cottage hearth far more than with the palace. If he
became a strong supporter of what has been called 'the hierarchy of
society,' it was chiefly because he believed the principle of 'equality'
to be fatal to the well-being and the true dignity of the poor.
Moreover, in siding politically with the Crown and the coronets, he
considered himself to be siding with the weaker party in our democratic
days.

[271] See his Sonnet on the seat of Dante, close to the Duomo at
Florence (_Poems of Early and Late Years_).

The absence of love-poetry in Wordsworth's works has often been
remarked upon, and indeed brought as a charge against them. He once told
me that if he had avoided that form of composition, it was by no means
because the theme did not interest him, but because, treated as it
commonly has been, it tends rather to disturb and lower the reader's
moral and imaginative being than to elevate it. He feared to handle it
amiss. He seemed to think that the subject had been so long vulgarised,
that few poets had a right to assume that they could treat it worthily,
especially as the theme, when treated unworthily, was such an easy and
cheap way of winning applause. It has been observed also that the
Religion of Wordsworth's poetry, at least of his earlier poetry, is not
as distinctly 'Revealed Religion' as might have been expected from this
poet's well-known adherence to what he has called emphatically 'The
lord, and mighty paramount of Truths.' He once remarked to me himself on
this circumstance, and explained it by stating that when in youth his
imagination was shaping for itself the channel in which it was to flow,
his religious convictions were less definite and less strong than they
had become on more mature thought, and that when his poetic mind and
manner had once been formed, he feared that he might, in attempting to
modify them, have become constrained. He added that on such matters he
ever wrote with great diffidence, remembering that if there were many
subjects too low for song, there were some too high. Wordsworth's
general confidence in