ing to join in 'the unworthy service' of suppressing liberty abroad. He even 'exulted,' he tells us, when the first attempts of Englishmen to resist the revolutionary armies met with shameful defeat; and sat gloomily in church when prayers were offered for victory, feeding on the day of vengeance yet to come. Some people were cosmopolitan enough to find no difficulty in suppressing patriotic compunctions; but Wordsworth, solitary and recluse as he was, was penetrated to the core by the sentiments of which patriotism is the natural growth. He only, he says, who 'loves the sight of a village steeple as I do' can judge of 'the conflict of sensations without name' with which he joined such congregations. His private and public sympathies were now clashing in the cruelest way. Meanwhile, he felt the taunts of those who were echoing Madame Roland's cry, 'O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!' It was well that the infant republic had 'throttled the snakes about its cradle' with the might of a Hercules; but his soul was sick at thought of the odium that was being incurred by liberty. His thoughts by day were 'most melancholy,' and 'for months and years, after the last beat of those atrocities,' he
