The three years he had spent at Cambridge, from 1787 till the end of 1790, if they did nothing else for him, had begun to draw out his social feelings. The order of his interests had been this. In early boyhood animal activity and trivial pleasures had engrossed him. In due time these had retired, and, before school-time was over, Nature stood out preëminent, almost alone, in his affections. Up to his twenty-second year, man had been to him a quite subordinate object. What Cambridge began, residence in France had perfected,—his interest in man for his own sake, and in all the great problems, practical and speculative, connected with man. These problems, present, more or less, to every age, had by the revolutionary fervor been quickened into feverish intensity, and driven on to new and far-reaching issues. Smitten to the core with the contagion of the time, Wordsworth began to meditate feelingly on man, his sufferings, his artificial restraints, his aspirations, his destiny. He pondered long and deeply the questions of government, and the best forms of it,—of society, of morality and its grounds, of man’s perfection and its possibility. Even when for a time under the Reign of Terror his immediate hopes from the Revolution faded, yet he did not cease to ponder the questions which recent events had brought to the surface. The fall of Robespierre and his “atheist crew” revived his hopes. Though none of the public acts of France pleased him, yet his faith in the people was still strong; no external blunders, he believed, would take “life from the young Republic.” For a while he dreamed on his golden dreams about a perfected humanity. Still for a time to him “The whole earth The beauty wore of promise.”... “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to the young was heaven.”