The atrocities that followed filled him with horror and dismay. Robespierre's fall revived for a brief interval his hopes. The news of it reached him as he was crossing the sands at Ulverstone :

'Come now, ye golden times,'
Said I, forth pouring on those open sands
A hymn of triumph: 'as the Morning comes
From out the bosom of the Night, come ye.”1

'But this ecstasy was of short duration: the cloud which hung over France became as dense and as dark as ever; and his sadness was not relieved, but pressed with a wearier weight upon his soul.' He was distressed with a very turmoil of perplexity and doubt. It was at this time he owed so much to his sister's influence :Then it was

Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all Good

That the belovéd sister, in whose sight

Those days were pass'd.

Maintain'd for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.3

His democratical opinions gradually passed away, but left behind tempered feelings of deep and tender sympathy with the poor, and a quick appreciation of the grace and simple dignity of which humble life is susceptible. From the fretful stir' of human passion, from the burden of the mystery,' from

The heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,1

Wordsworth fled for refuge to a peaceful spiritual contemplation of nature. He has written few finer or more characteristic verses than some which he composed in 1798, upon revisiting the sweet scenery of the Wye :

I have learn'd

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,

1 Prelude, 291; Memoirs, etc., 84.
3 Prelude, 309; Memoirs, etc., i. 90.

4 Poet. Works: Tintern Abbey' (1798), i. 151.

2 Memoirs, etc., 84.

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows, and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear-both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature, and the language of the sense,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.1

No doubt there are in this poem and in others of the same period traces of something like a pantheistic philosophy in which enthusiastic love of nature degenerates into nature-worship, and the thought of God is merged in the contemplation of the works of God. At the least, there is an evident tendency to exaggerate the power of nature as a means of purifying humanity, and supporting it amid infirmity and sorrows.2 In his later years, while his delight in natural beauty remained strong as ever, he was more invariably quick to discern that the soul of man, fallen as it is from innocence, cannot find the wisdom and the happiness it craves in any mere outward things. It needs aids and remedies more truly divine than these. The following passage, lovely as it is, needs the correction supplied in the later verses, quoted next after them :—

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform

1 Poet. Works: Tintern Abbey' (1798), i. 151.

2 Cf. his verses on the Simplon Pass (1799), ii. 100, and those upon the 'Influences of Nature in his Childhood,' i. 93, also in 1799.

3 Cf. Memoirs, i. 48.

The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.1

Compare it with the following part of his 4th 'Evening
Voluntary,' written thirty-six years afterwards :—

But who is innocent? By grace divine,
Nor otherwise, O Nature! we are thine,
Through good and evil thine, in just degree
Of rational and manly sympathy.

:

To all that Earth from pensive hearts is stealing,
And Heaven is now to gladden'd eyes revealing,
Add every charm the Universe can show
Through every change its aspects undergo-
Care may be respited, but not repeal'd;
No perfect cure grows on that bounded field.
Vain is the pleasure, a false calm the peace,
If He, through whom alone our conflicts cease,
Our virtuous hopes without relapse advance,
Come not to speed the soul's deliverance? 2

But from the first there was little fear that Wordsworth's influence could be otherwise than conducive to true religious feeling. The pure and genuine enthusiasm of a mind sensitively awake to a spiritual presence in all that surrounded him, and to 'the types and symbols of eternity,' manifested to man in outward forms of earth and sea and sky, is almost sure to be beneficial to those who feel its influence. Even if it be in excess, it is not likely to lead men astray. Those finer chords of feeling to which it appeals are very rarely in danger, among the majority of even cultivated men, of being excited into undue or too frequent action. The reader, however much he may admire, is far more likely to lag behind

1 Poet. Works: 'Tintern Abbey' (1798), i. 154; ‘One Impulse from a Vernal Wood' (1798), iv. 181.

2 Poet. Works: Fourth Evening Voluntary,' iv. 127.

Id.: 'The Simplon Pass' (1799), ii. 100.

the poet's thought that to be led in advance of it. Moreover and is so dosely allled to the regions sentiment that it may be generally trusted in the end to favour and promote it Watever stirs the mind to refect spot trunk and beauty, spod the ideal and supra-sensa spon the traces of a Divine image both in nature and kuumanity is adapted to enlarge the val and prepare it for a pad reception of the noblest katies of Christianity. Wordsworth, throughout his Me in the earlier as well as in his later works, was a true religious teacher, and a teacher whose direct or indirect int lence has been very widely felt The Christian Year, for instance, even if it had been written, would certainly never have gained the popularity it has had, were it not for the growth of that finer, semi-religious love of nature which Wordsworth and his brother writers did so much to disseminate and increase.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was also one in that vociety of poets, of whom Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Rogers were the other principal members. His earlier poems were published in 1797, conjointly with other verses by Coleridge and Charles Lloyd. Southey hailed the volume with delight, and thought that none other that had lately appeared could be compared with it. Certainly, there is often a grave and gentle reflectiveness about Lamb's poetry which is very fascinating. He had no love for the country. Beyond all other men whom I have ever met,' writes his biographer, he was essentially metropolitan.' When Wordsworth dwelt upon the beauties of the Lake Country, and pressed him to come and see him there, he answered that he was 'not at all romance-bit about Nature. . . . When all is said, it is but a house to live in.' Nevertheless, he was a lover of Wordsworth's poetry; and Coleridge, his old school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, he loved and admired throughout life with a

Life of R. Southey, by his Son, i. 329.

2 Barry Cornwall's Memoir of Charles Lamb, 222.

3 Id. 84.

fervency of attachment far surpassing that of any common friendship.

Lamb had many sympathies in common with his friends, and, like theirs, his poetry was always pure and high-toned. He not unfrequently touches in his verse upon religious subjects, as in his 'Vision of Repentance,' or in his lines upon the 'Sabbath Bells,' whichwherever heard,

Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice

Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims
Tidings of good to Zion.1

In the following, from his 'Lines on Leonardo da Vinci's Picture of the Virgin of the Rocks,' there is a something which may slightly remind the reader of a passage in Wordsworth's noble Ode to Immortality:'

But at her side

An angel doth abide,
With such a perfect joy
As no dim doubts alloy,
An intuition,

A glory, an amenity,

Passing the dark condition

Of blind humanity,

As if he surely knew

All the blest wonders would ensue,

Or he had lately left the upper sphere,

And had read all the sovran schemes and divine riddles

there.2

He was certainly not one of those who have thought that poetry is exercised to a disadvantage upon divine subjects. Witness the following:—

The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever

A lone enthusiast maid. She loves to walk
In the bright visions of empyreal light,
By the green pastures and the fragrant meads,
Where the perpetual flowers of Eden blow;
By crystal streams, and by the living waters,
Along whose margin grows the wondrous tree

1 Poetical Works of Charles Lamb, 70.

2 Id. 48.