In weightier matters than mere travel, Wordsworth showed himself no mere recluse.  He watched the great affairs then being transacted in Europe with the ardent interest of his youth, and his sonnets to Liberty, commemorating the attack by France upon the Swiss, the fate of Venice, the struggle of Hofer, the resistance of Spain, give no unworthy expression to some of the best of the many and varied motives that animated England in her long struggle with Bonaparte.  The sonnet to Toussaint l’Ouverture concludes with some of the noblest lines in the English language.  The strong verses on the expected death of Mr. Fox are alive with a magnanimous public spirit that goes deeper than the accidents of political opinion.  In his young days he had sent Fox a copy of the Lyrical Ballads, with a long letter indicating his sense of Fox’s great and generous qualities.  Pitt he admits that he could never regard with complacency.  “I believe him, however,” he said, “to have been as disinterested a man, and as true a lover of his country, as it was possible for so ambitious a man to be.  His first wish (though probably unknown to himself) was that his country should prosper under his administration; his next that it should prosper.  Could the order of these wishes have been reversed, Mr. Pitt would have avoided many of the grievous mistakes into which, I think, he fell.”  “You always went away from Burke,” he once told Haydon, “with your mind filled; from Fox with your feelings excited; and from Pitt with wonder at his having had the power to make the worse appear the better reason.”

Of the poems composed under the influence of that best kind of patriotism which ennobles local attachments by associating them with the lasting elements of moral grandeur and heroism it is needless to speak.  They have long taken their place as something higher even than literary classics.  As years began to dull the old penetration of a mind which had once approached, like other youths, the shield of human nature from the golden side, and had been eager to “clear a passage for just government,” Wordsworth lost his interest in progress.  Waterloo may be taken for the date at which his social grasp began to fail, and with it his poetic glow.  He opposed Catholic emancipation as stubbornly as Eldon, and the Reform Bill as bitterly as Croker.  For the practical reforms of his day, even in education, for which he had always spoken up, Wordsworth was not a force.  His heart clung to England as he found it.  “This concrete attachment to the scenes about him,” says Mr. Myers, “had always formed an important element In his character.  Ideal politics, whether in Church or State, had never occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its informing principles embodied in the England of his own day.”  This flowed, we may suppose, from Burke.  In a passage in the seventh Book of the Prelude, he describes, in lines a little prosaic but quite true, how he sat, saw, and heard, not unthankful nor uninspired, the great orator