Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious. Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism. They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth with the same horror with which a reader of the _Morning Post_ would learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth may well have appeared to these orthodox parents a representative of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be looked on as invalid--as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary. Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had already gone so far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette. Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her