with blood; the Convention was constituted; monarchy was abolished; a rupture ensued between the Gironde and the Montagne; Robespierre arose; Deism was dominant; the influence of Brissot and of the Girondists was on the decline; and in a short time they were about to fall victims to the power which they themselves had created.”[F] Such is a summary of the events which transpired whilst Wordsworth was in France; and he has left us a record of the hopes, and wild exultations with which he hailed the Revolution, when it first boomed above the horizon of the morning. “Before him shone a glorious world Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled To music suddenly; He looked upon the hills and plains, And seemed as if let loose from chains, To live at liberty.” But, alas! the counterpart of the picture came as suddenly, not attended by the sweet breathings of a delicious music, but by the roar of mad and fiery throats, and the pageantry of blood and death. Before these dread events took place, and whilst hope was still high in the poet’s heart, he made acquaintance with some of the most distinguished personages on the republican side--and, amongst others, with General Beaupuis, whom he characterises as a philosopher, patriot, and soldier, and one of the noblest men in France. At length, he stands in the midst of the Revolution; quits Orleans for Blois, and, in 1792, arrived in Paris, only a month after the horrors and massacres of September. Republicanism had prevailed--and what a republic it proved! All law and order suspended, or dead--thousands of innocent and patriotic men condemned to death on the faintest suspicions--the ghastly skeleton of Atheism seated on the throne of God--and liberty strangled in her own cradle. “What a picture,” says De Quincy, “does Wordsworth give of the fury which then possessed the public mind; of the frenzy which shone in every eye, and through every gesture; of the stormy groups assembled at the Palais Royal, or the Tuilleries, with ‘hissing factionists,’ for ever in their centre? ‘hissing,’ from the self-baffling of their own madness, and incapable, from wrath, of speaking clearly; of fear already creeping over the manners of multitudes; of stealthy movements through back streets; plotting and counter-plotting in every family; feuds to extermination--dividing children of the same house for ever; scenes, such as those of the _Chapel Royal_ (now silenced on that public stage), repeating themselves daily amongst private friends; and to show the universality of this maniacal possession--that it was no narrow storm discharging its fury, by local concentration, upon a single city, but that it overspread the whole realm of France--a picture is given, wearing the same features of what passed daily at Orleans, Blois, and other towns. The citizens are described in the attitudes they assumed at the daily coming in of the post from Paris; the fierce sympathy is