Wordsworth took his B.A. degree in January, 1791, and quitted Cambridge with no fixed intentions as to his future career. “He did not feel himself,” he said long afterwards, “good enough for the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the law. He had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy of war; and he always fancied that he had talents for command; and he at one time thought of a military life; but then he was without connexions, and he felt if he were ordered to the West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that up.” He therefore repaired to London, and lived there for a time on a small allowance and with no definite aim. His relations with the great city were of a very slight and external kind. He had few acquaintances, and spent his time mainly in rambling about the streets. His descriptions of this phase of his life have little interest. There is some flatness in an enumeration of the nationalities observable in a London crowd, concluding thus:—

Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,

And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

But Wordsworth’s limitations were inseparably connected with his strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had only served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the bewilderment of London taught him to recognize with an intenser joy such fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load impossible to shake off. “And what hath Nature,” he plaintively asked,—

And what hath Nature but the blank void sky

And the thronged river toiling to the main?

But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one may say, the poet not of London considered as London, but of London considered as a part of the country. Like his own Farmer of Tilsbury Vale—

In the throng of the Town like a Stranger is he,

Like one whose own Country’s far over the sea;

And Nature, while through the great city be hies,

Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise.

Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision and memory none is more exquisite than the Reverie of Poor Susan:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,

Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;

Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard

In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart with one of those sudden “revulsions into the natural” which philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and hest known of all these poems is the Sonnet on Westminster Bridge, “Earth hath not anything to show more fair;” in which nature has reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men; and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great City—as Sterling imagined it on his dying-bed—“not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand and everlasting.” And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of listeners in his Power of Music:

Now, Coaches and Chariots! Roar on like a stream!

Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream:

They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,

Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!

He never made the attempt,—vulgarized by so many a “fashionable novelist,” and in which no poet has succeeded yet,—to disentangle from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness; to enter that realm of emotion where Nature’s aspects become the scarcely noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own; to trace the passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista toward a sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares by summer moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers.

But although Wordsworth passed thus through London unmodified and indifferent, the current of things was sweeping him on to mingle in a fiercer tumult,—to be caught in the tides of a more violent and feverish life. In November 1791 he landed in France, meaning to pass the winter at Orleans and learn French. Up to this date the French Revolution had impressed him in a rather unusual manner,—namely, as being a matter of course. The explanation of this view is a somewhat singular one. Wordsworth’s was an old family, and his connexions were some of them wealthy and well placed in the world; but the chances of his education had been such, that he could scarcely realize to himself any other than a democratic type of society. Scarcely once, he tells us, in his school days had he seen boy or man who claimed respect on the score of wealth and blood; and the manly atmosphere of Cambridge preserved even in her lowest days a society

Where all stood thus far

Upon equal ground; that we were brothers all

In honour, as in one community,

Scholars and gentlemen;

while the teachings of nature and the dignity of Cumbrian peasant life had confirmed his high opinion of the essential worth of man. The upheaval of the French people, therefore, and the downfall of privilege, seemed to him no portent for good or evil, but rather the tardy return of a society to its stable equilibrium. He passed through revolutionized Paris with satisfaction and sympathy, but with little active emotion, and proceeded first to Orleans, and then to Blois, between which places he spent nearly a year. At Orleans he became intimately acquainted with the nobly-born but republican general Beaupuis, an inspiring example of all in the Revolution that was self-devoted and chivalrous and had compassion on the wretched poor. In conversation with him Wordsworth learnt with what new force the well-worn adages of the moralist fall from the lips of one who is called upon to put them at once in action, and to stake life itself on the verity of his maxims of honour. The poet’s heart burned within him as he listened. He could not indeed help mourning sometimes at the sight of a dismantled chapel, or peopling in imagination the forest-glades in which they sat with the chivalry of a bygone day. But he became increasingly absorbed in his friend’s ardour, and the Revolution—mulier formosa superne—seemed to him big with all the hopes of man.

He returned to Paris in October 1792,—a month after the massacres of September; and he has described his agitation and dismay at the sight of such world-wide destinies swayed by the hands of such men. In a passage which curiously illustrates that reasoned self-confidence and deliberate boldness which for the most part he showed only in the peaceful incidents of a literary career, he has told us how he was on the point of putting himself forward as a leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of the multitude might not impossibly rally.

Such a course of action,—which, whatever its other results, would undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his political friends in May 1793,—was rendered impossible by a somewhat undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes “a patriot of the world,” was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty-two, travelling on a small allowance, and running his head into unnecessary dangers. His funds were stopped, and he reluctantly returned to England at the close of 1792.

And now to Wordsworth, as to many other English patriots, there came, on a great scale, that form of sorrow which in private life is one of the most agonizing of all—when two beloved beings, each of them erring greatly, become involved in bitter hate. The new-born Republic flung down to Europe as her battle-gage the head of a king. England, in an hour of horror that was almost panic, accepted the defiance, and war was declared between the two countries early in 1793. “No shock,” says Wordsworth,

Given to my moral nature had I known

Down to that very moment; neither lapse

Nor turn of sentiment that might be named

A revolution, save at this one time;

and the sound of the evening gun-fire at Portsmouth seemed at once the embodiment and the premonition of England’s guilt and woe.

Yet his distracted spirit could find no comfort in the thought of France. For in France the worst came to the worst; and everything vanished of liberty except the crimes committed in her name.

Most melancholy at that time, O Friend!

Were my day-thoughts, my nights were miserable.

Through months, through years, long after the last beat

Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep

To me came rarely charged with natural gifts—

Such ghastly visions had I of despair,

And tyranny, and implements of death; . . .

And levity in dungeons, where the dust

Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene

Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me

In long orations, which I strove to plead

Before unjust tribunals,—with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,

Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt

In the last place of refuge—my own soul.

These years of perplexity and disappointment, following on a season of overstrained and violent hopes, were the sharpest trial through which Wordsworth ever passed. The course of affairs in France, indeed, was such as seemed by an irony of fate to drive the noblest and firmest hearts into the worst aberrations. For first of all in that Revolution, Reason had appeared as it were in visible shape, and hand in hand with Pity and Virtue; then, as the welfare of the oppressed peasantry began to be lost sight of amid the brawls of the factions of Paris, all that was attractive and enthusiastic in the great movement seemed to disappear, but yet Reason might still be thought to find a closer realization here than among scenes more serene and fair; and, lastly, Reason set in blood and tyranny and there was no more hope from France. But those who, like Wordsworth, had been taught by that great convulsion to disdain the fetters of sentiment and tradition and to look on Reason as supreme were not willing to relinquish their belief because violence had conquered her in one more battle. Rather they clung with the greater tenacity,— “adhered,” in Wordsworth’s words,

More firmly to old tenets, and to prove

Their temper, strained them more;

cast off more decisively than ever the influences of tradition, and in their Utopian visions even wished to see the perfected race severed in its perfection from the memories of humanity, and from kinship with the struggling past.

Through a mood of this kind Wordsworth had to travel now. And his nature, formed for pervading attachments and steady memories, suffered grievously from the privation of much which even the coldest and calmest temper cannot forego without detriment and pain. For it is not with impunity that men commit themselves to the sole guidance of either of the two great elements of their being. The penalties of trusting to the emotions alone are notorious; and every day affords some instance of a character that has degenerated into a bundle of impulses, of a will that has become caprice. But the consequences of making Reason our tyrant instead of our king are almost equally disastrous. There is so little which Reason, divested of all emotional or instinctive supports, is able to prove to our satisfaction that a sceptical aridity is likely to take possession of the soul. It was thus with Wordsworth; he was driven to a perpetual questioning of all beliefs and analysis of all motives,—

Till, demanding formal proof,

And seeking it in everything, I lost

All feeling of conviction; and, in fine,

Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,

Yielded up moral questions in despair.

In this mood all those great generalized conceptions which are the food of our love, our reverence, our religion, dissolve away; and Wordsworth tells us that at this time

Even the visible universe

Fell under the dominion of a taste

Less spiritual, with microscopic view

Was scanned, as I had scanned the moral world.

He looked on the operations of nature “in disconnection dull and spiritless;” he could no longer apprehend her unity nor feel her charm. He retained indeed his craving for natural beauty, but in an uneasy and fastidious mood,—

Giving way

To a comparison of scene with scene,

Bent overmuch on superficial things,

Pampering myself with meagre novelties

Of colour and proportion; to the moods

Of time and season, to the moral power,

The affections, and the spirit of the place,

Insensible.

Such cold fits are common to all religions: they haunt the artist, the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often they are due to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed itself with the impersonal desire; sometimes, as in Wordsworth’s case, to the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too ardently towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when the objects of a man’s habitual admiration are true and noble, they will ever be found to suggest some antidote to the fatigues of their pursuit. We shall see as we proceed how a deepening insight into the lives of the peasantry around him,—the happiness and virtue of simple Cumbrian homes,—restored to the poet a serener confidence in human nature, amid all the shame and downfall of such hopes in France. And that still profounder loss of delight in Nature herself,—that viewing of all things “in disconnection dull and spiritless,” which, as it has been well said, is the truest definition of Atheism, inasmuch as a unity in the universe is the first element in our conception of God,—this dark pathway also was not without its outlet into the day. For the God in Nature is not only a God of Beauty, but a God of Law; his unity can be apprehended in power as well as in glory; and Wordsworth’s mind, “sinking inward upon itself from thought to thought,” found rest for the time in that austere religion,—Hebrew at once and scientific, common to a Newton and a Job,—which is fostered by the prolonged contemplation of the mere Order of the sum of things.

Not in vain

I had been taught to reverence a Power

That is the visible quality and shape

And image of right reason.

Not, indeed, in vain! For he felt now that there is no side of truth, however remote from human interests, no aspect of the universe, however awful and impersonal, which may not have power at some season to guide and support the spirit of man. When Goodness is obscured, when Beauty wearies, there are some souls which still can cling and grapple to the conception of eternal Law.

Of such stem consolations the poet speaks as having restored him in his hour of need. But he gratefully acknowledges also another solace of a gentler kind. It was about this time (1795) that Wordsworth was blessed with the permanent companionship of his sister, to whom he was tenderly attached, but whom, since childhood, he had seen only at long intervals. Miss Wordsworth, after her father’s death, had lived mainly with her maternal grandfather, Mr. Cookson, at Penrith, occasionally at Halifax with other relations, or at Forncott with her uncle Dr. Cookson, Canon of Windsor. She was now able to join her favourite brother: and in this gifted woman Wordsworth found a gentler and sunnier likeness of himself; he found a love which never wearied, and a sympathy fervid without blindness, whose suggestions lay so directly in his mind’s natural course that they seemed to spring from the same individuality, and to form at once a portion of his inmost being. The opening of this new era of domestic happiness demands a separate chapter.