What is to
become of me I know not.' He proposed to start a Republican
magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring
whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal
misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless
metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us,
and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease
assumes. The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil
for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.
'So I fared,
Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,
Suspiciously, to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours; now believing,
Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground
Of obligation, what the rule and whence
The sanction; till, demanding formal PROOF,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
This was the crisis of that strong disease,
This the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped,
Deeming our blessed reason of least use
Where wanted most: "The lordly attributes
Of will and choice," I bitterly exclaimed,
"What are they but a mockery of a Being
Who hath in no concerns of his a test
Of good and evil; knows not what to fear
Or hope for, what to covet or to shun:
And who, if those could be discerned, would yet
Be little profited, would see, and ask,
Where is the obligation to enforce?"'
In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of
Raisley Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he
immediately set to work on the Borderers, which I take to be the
beginning of recovery.
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