enjoyment betrayed in a letter of the same period to his sister. The Swiss tour took him through France during the early enthusiasm of the Revolution, and his sympathy was the natural expansion of the crude republicanism of the Cumberland shepherd and Cambridge undergraduate. His London experience is characteristic. He is essentially the countryman wondering at the metropolis. In the seventh book of the Prelude he gives a list of all the sights which bewildered him, from Burke in the House of Commons and Mrs. Siddons on the stage, down to waxworks and blind beggars in the streets and shameless women using bad language in public-houses. He passes from his quaint bits of prose—unconsciously humorous—to pathetic and elevating thoughts. But the spectacle passes before him without involving him; he has no talks, like Coleridge's, at the Cat and Salutation to record; he picks up no chums and joins no clubs; his proper position is that of the famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge, when he alone wakes and meditates on the 'mighty heart' that is 'lying still.' London is part of that vast machinery, including the universe in general, of which it sometimes seems to be the final cause that it is to mould the central object, William Wordsworth. It suggests
