286
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! 0 time
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
PARTISAN REVIEW
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights!
When most intent on making of herself
A prime enchantress-to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole Earth,
The beauty wore of promise-that which sets ...
The budding rose above the rose fuJI blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
... who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtlety, and strength
Their ministers,-who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;-they, too, who of gentle mood
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;-
Now was it that
both
found, the meek and lofty
Did both find helpers to their hearts' desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish,–
Were called upon to exercise their skiJl,
Not in Utopia,-subterranean fields,-
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,-the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all!
The Prell/de
(1850 edn., BkXI, 11.105-144.)
That of course was Wordsworth recollecting his youthful experiences
in the French Revolution and remaining loyal to his sense of the validity
of the visionary power embodied in its collective social imagination even
after he had become an old and extremely conservative poet laureate. The
French Revolution, of course, had been preceded and was subsequently
followed throughout the nineteenth century by a legion of utopian and
dystopian representations in a stunning diversity of modes and genres.
From imaginations of a new social cosmos, such as those put forth by
