they are the ladders by which he mounts to higher planes of exertion. The deep, restless ocean, which swathes all our continents in its purifying immensities, which, as the path of universal intercommunication among races, is the chief outward civilizer of humanity,would you look despondently and angrily at the sublime ocean because of the destruction by its temporary storms? When some one, in the presence of Canova, à propos of a recent assassination, disparaged the Italians on account of their passionateness, the eminent sculptor affirmed that it was to the fire of their passions that the Italians owed their great achievements in life and history.

And this deep, fiery, restless element, this electric source of all human movement, must not be too much compressed. If it be, there will come a terrific bursting of boilers. In France the royal and sacertodal engineers, who for centuries had control of the official locomotive, had become so stupefied by selfishness, through long exercise of irresponsible power, so paralyzed by self-indulgence, that they had no feeling for the needs, no perception of the forces, of the mass they undertook to guide. Hence the twofold tyranny growing more and more tyrannical, oppression more oppressive,

a great and patient people's heart at last so heaved under the galling infliction that it rent the rotted bonds that bound it. In the frenzy of liberation were committed passionate excesses, surface bubbles, thrown up from the black abysses of unspeakable wrong, accumulated by many cruel generations. When Wordsworth passed through Paris on his way to Orleans, out of the rayless slimy caves of ignorance and fear-which were the mental homes of the masses brutified by bad government — had not yet crept the hideous monsters, begotten on darkness by despotism, who a little later crawled forth to thaw their benumbed ferocity at the fires kindled by terror and revenge, and quickened by sprinklings of blood. Robespierre and his like were not yet conspicuous.

At Orleans Wordsworth became acquainted with a band of officers of rank, Frenchmen, so disgusted with the Revolution that they stood ready, at the first provocation or opportunity, to join, on the Rhine, the emigrants in arms against their country. One of these, Beaupuis, a man of high title, distinguished in person, manners, and mind, was a patriot, and therefore spurned, as the great Mirabeau was, by his titled associates. From the picture Words

worth draws of Beaupuis in "The Prelude," he seems to have been one of those clear, cordial men, whose moral sensibilities guide them to the right road. Others of the French nobles of that momentous period, too expansive and generous to intrench themselves in the citadels of privilege, gave their hearts and lives to the cause of the oppressed millions. To Beaupuis Wordsworth pays this beautiful tribute:

"A meeker man

Than this lived never, nor a more benign,
Meek though enthusiastic. Injuries

Made him more gracious, and his nature then
Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,

As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf

When foot hath crushed them.

Man he loved

As man; and to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension; but did rather seem
A passion and a gallantry, like that
Which he, a soldier, in his idler day
Had paid to woman."

They became close friends, had long, intimate talks together, walking in the venerable forests near Orleans, or along the Loire, a mutual comfort and support. One day, meeting a poor girl, thin and pale from want of food, languidly leading a heifer to crop grass by the

roadside, Beaupuis exclaimed, with agitation, "'Tis against that we are fighting." Soon called to lead an army against the Vendeans,

"He perished fighting, in supreme command,

Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire."

In the autumn of 1792, Wordsworth went back to Paris. The king had been dethroned and imprisoned, the Republic declared; the Girondists were sinking, Robespierre was rising; the German army, on the borders of France, was hastening the reign of terror. A fortnight before he arrived, had occurred the massacres of September. The great city heaved like a volcano in travail. Wordsworth was awed. What his feelings were the first night in his high, lonely chamber, he records in the following grand passage:

"With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals; the fear gone by
Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.

I thought of those September massacres,
Divided from me by one little month,

Saw them and touched: the rest was conjured up
From tragic fiction or true history,

Remembrances and dim admonishments.

The horse is taught his manage, and no star
Of wildest course but treads back his own steps;
For the spent hurricane the air provides

As fierce a successor; the tide retreats
But to return out of its hiding-place

In the great deep; all things have second birth;

The earthquake is not satisfied at once;
And in this way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried
To the whole city, 'Sleep no more." "

And yet, through his sympathy with the deep, regenerative movement, such was the fascination of the terrible city, that, had he not been called suddenly to England by pressing demands there, he would have remained in Paris, and have "seen it out," to perish probably with his Girondist friends.

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