Grasmere home, and of the strong responsive emotion with which the
poet met each shock of European fates.

When England first took up arms against the French revolution,
Wordsworth's feeling, as we have seen, had been one of unmixed
sorrow and shame. Bloody and terrible as the revolution had become,
it was still in some sort representative of human freedom; at any
rate it might still seem to contain possibilities of progress such
as the retrograde despotisms with which England allied herself could
never know. But the conditions of the contest changed before long.
France had not the wisdom, the courage, the constancy to play to the
end the part for which she had seemed chosen among the nations. It
was her conduct towards Switzerland which decisively altered
Wordsworth's view. He saw her valiant spirit of self-defence
corrupted into lust of glory; her eagerness for the abolition of
unjust privilege turned into a contentment with equality of
degradation under a despot's heel. "One man, of men the meanest
too,"--for such the First Consul must needs appear to the moralist's
eye,--was

Raised up to sway the world--to do, undo;
With mighty nations for his underlings.

And history herself seemed vulgarized by the repetition of her
ancient tales of war and overthrow on a scale of such apparent
magnitude, but with no glamour of distance to hide the baseness of
the agencies by which the destinies of Europe were shaped anew. This
was an occasion that tried the hearts of men; it was not easy to
remain through all those years at once undazzled and untempted, and
never in the blackest hour to despair of human virtue.