But when Britain declared war against France, and France changed a war of self-defense for one of aggression, then came disgust with his own country, disappointment and vexation with France, despair of her promoting the cause of Liberty. Still he clung stubbornly to his old tenets, and even strained them farther. At last, when he saw the Emperor crowned by the Pope, this was too much for him. It was the last opprobrium, the final blow to his republican ardor. He had seen a people from whom he hoped all things, a nation which erewhile had looked up in faith to heaven for manna, take a lesson from the dog returning to his vomit. Then for a time the whole fabric of his hope and faith gave way. He fell into distrust, not only of nations, but of himself. The faiths, intuitions, aspirations which he had hitherto lived by, failed him. He cross-questioned all fundamental principles, and if they could not vindicate themselves by formal proof, rejected them. At last, losing all hold on conviction, wearied out with endless perplexities, he doubted all moral truth, and gave it up in despair. With his hopes for man, and his faith in man’s destiny, the poetic vision of Nature, which had hitherto been with him, disappeared, and his immediate converse with Him who through Nature spoke to him was for a time eclipsed. Under the tyranny of the logical and analyzing faculty, his intelligence was no longer an organ which transmitted clearly the light from without to the light within him, but, entangled in the meshes of the finite understanding, he could for a time see or receive nothing which he could not verify by logic. He looked on the outer world no more in a free imaginative way as of old, but compared scene with scene, and judged and criticised them by artificial rules. “To the moods Of time and season, to the moral power, The affections and the spirit of the place Insensible.” This to one like Wordsworth, more than to most men, was abnegation of his higher self, was in fact moral death. It was the lowest depth into which he sank, the climax of what he himself calls “his degradation.”