With patient care. What tho' assaults run high, They daunt not him who holds his ministry, Resolute, at all hazards, to fulfil

Its duties; prompt to move, but firm to wait,
Knowing, things rashly sought are rarely found;
That, for the functions of an ancient State-
Strong by her charters, free because imbound,
Servant of Providence, not slave of Fate—
Perilous is sweeping change, all chance unsound.'

'Who ponders National events shall find
An awful balancing of loss and gain,
Joy based on sorrow, good with ill combined,
And proud deliverance issuing out of pain
And direful throes; as if the All-ruling Mind,
With whose perfection it consists to ordain
Volcanic burst, earthquake and hurricane,
Dealt in like sort with feeble human kind
By laws immutable. But woe for him
Who thus deceived shall lend an eager hand
To social havoc. Is not Conscience ours,
And Truth, whose eye guilt only can make dim;
And Will, whose office, by divine command,
Is to control and check disordered Powers?'

'Long-favoured England! be not thou misled
By monstrous theories of alien growth,
Lest alien frenzy seize thee, waxing wroth,
Self smitten till thy garments reek dyed red
With thy own blood, which tears in torrents shed
Fail to wash out, tears flowing ere thy troth
Be plighted, not to ease but sullen sloth,
Or wan despair - the ghost of false hope fled
Into a shameful grave. Among thy youth,
My Country! if such warning be held dear,
Then shall a Veteran's heart be thrilled with joy,
One who would gather from eternal truth,
For time and season, rules that work to cheer
Not scourge, to save the People — not destroy.'1

1 Vol. iv. p. 259, 260.

These warnings will come with more force from one who was through life one of the most devoted friends of true liberty, and in his earlier days was beguiled by what is sometimes called liberty, but is licentiousness, and therefore tends, not to emancipate, but enslave mankind, as he himself says:

'He saw upon the soil of France

Rash Polity begin her maniac dance,

Foundations broken up, the deeps run wild,
Nor grieved to see (himself not unbeguiled) —
Woke from the dream, the dreamer to upbraid,
And learn how sanguine expectations fade
When novel trusts by folly are betrayed,
To see Presumption, turning pale, refrain
From further havoc, but repent in vain,
Good aims lie down, and perish in the road
Where guilt had urged them on with ceaseless goad,
Proofs thickening round her that on public ends
Domestic virtue vitally depends,

That civic strife can turn the happiest hearth
Into a grievous sore of self-tormenting earth.'1

But we must return to our narrative.

1The Warning, vol. iv. p. 239.

CHAPTER X.

RACEDOWN.

6

IN the autumn of 1795, William Wordsworth and his sister were settled at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. The house in which they lived belonged to Mr. Pinney, of Bristol, a friend of Mr. Basil Montagu. 'The country,' says his sister, in one of her letters, ‘is delightful; we have charming walks, a good garden, a pleasant house,'- which was pretty well stocked with books. Here they employed themselves industriously in reading, if reading can ever deserve the name of industry,' says Wordsworth in a letter to his friend Mathews, writing, and gardening. My brother,' she says, handles the spade with great dexterity.' 'She herself,' he says, 'had gone through half of Davila, and yesterday we began Ariosto.'1 The place was very retired, with little or no society, and a post only once a week. Writing afterwards to a friend in 1799, she says, 'I think Racedown is the place dearest to my recollections upon the whole surface of the island; it was the first home I had.' She speaks with raptures of the 'lovely meadows above the tops of the combs, and the scenery on Pilsden, Lewisden, and Blackdown-hill, and the view of the sea from Lambert's Castle.'

6

In a letter to his friend Wrangham, on the 20th No

1 Dated Racedown, March 21, [1796.]

vember of this year, he sends him certain poetical Imitatations of JUVENAL, in which he was then occupied ; and it appears that he and his correspondent had undertaken to compose and publish conjointly a volume of such imitations. These specimens exhibit poetical vigour, combined with no little asperity and rancour against the abuses of the time, and the vices of the ruling powers, and the fashionable corruptions of aristocratical society. He

appears to have been engaged in this paraphrase of the Roman satirist till the following spring. But his labours were not brought to a close; and, ere many years had passed, he regretted the time spent upon the work. Application being then made to him for permission to publish what he had written of these imitations, he replied as follows:

'Nov. 7, 1806.

'I have long since come to a fixed resolution to steer clear of personal satire; in fact, I never will have any thing to do with it as far as concerns the private vices of individuals on any account. With respect to public delinquents or offenders, I will not say the same; though I should be slow to meddle even with these. This is a rule which I have laid down for myself, and shall rigidly adhere to; though I do not in all cases blame those who think and act differently.*

*[When the Sonnet against 'the Ballot,' as proposed by Mr. Grote, beginning 'Said Secrecy to Cowardice and Fraud,' first appeared in the separate volume of Sonnets, in 1838, it was inserted in a note with the following remark: 'In no part of my writings have I mentioned the name of any contemporary, that of Buonaparte only excepted, but for the purpose of eulogy; and therefore, as in the concluding verse of what follows, there is a deviation from this rule, (for the blank will easily be filled up,) I

'It will therefore follow, that I cannot lend any assistance to your proposed publication. The verses which you have of mine, I should wish to be destroyed; I have no copy of them myself, at least none that I can find. I would most willingly give them up to you, fame, profit, and everything, if I thought either true fame or profit could arise out of them.'

His next poetical employment was of a very different nature. He had completed his Salisbury Plain,' or 'Guilt and Sorrow,' and on October, 24th, 1796, his sister describes him as 'now ardent in the composition of a tragedy,' the BORDERERS.' The subject of this play had been probably suggested to him in his residence at Penrith and on the Scottish border, where are so many castles and other monuments connected with the age to which this drama belongs—the time of Henry III.

Though written in 1795-6, it did not see the light till near fifty years afterwards. It was first published in 1842. In the year 1843, he made the following observations in speaking with respect to it 1:

-

'The Borderers; a Tragedy. — Of this dramatic work I have little to say in addition to the short printed note which will be found attached to it. It was composed at Racedown in Dorsetshire, during the latter part of the year 1795, and in the course of the following year. it been the work of a later period of life, it would have

Had

have excluded the Sonnet from the body of the collection, and placed it here as a public record of my detestation, both as a man and a citizen, of the proposed contrivance.' — H. R.]

1 From MSS. I. F.