William Wordsworth and Nature’s Republic
In the tenth book of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, shadowed in design and verbal texture by Milton’s poem, the poet recounts the tumult he felt towards his native England as it waged war against a France whose Republican ideals represented the best hope of human dignity:
Exulted in the triumph of my soul
When Englishmen by thousands were o’er thrown.
Left without glory on the field, or driven,
Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief—
Grief call it not, ‘twas anything but that—
A conflict of sensations without name (Book 10, ll. 260-65)i
Wordsworth prompts us enough to invite us to find the shape of Milton’s poem in his own, with its events and figures recast, and as Virgil united the Iliad and Odyssey in the Aeneid, Wordsworth could be said to unite Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in his Prelude—the falling away from his native land restored by the poem’s end. Even if we accept this doubling of loss and restoration in the poem’s single arc, Books 9 and 10, the books about Wordsworth’s time in France in the early years of the Revolution, ask to be considered alongside Milton’s Books 9 and 10, the former narrating the temptation and fall, the latter the angry, guilt-ridden, ashamed aftermath, between Adam and God as well as Adam and Eve.
It soon becomes apparent that a direct mapping of Milton’s poem onto Wordsworth’s does not hold up: France is not Satan, the promise it holds forth is not a betrayal of the native goodness of England. Even where Robespierre is compared to Moloch, there is no singular Satan whose orders he obeys. Wordsworth’s engagement with Milton is intense in Book 10 especially, with explicit references to angels, prophets, Moloch, paradise, the fall, and even an address to God (an address to God as rare as Milton’s address to Adam, which takes place in that poem). But none of these tell us how Wordsworth wants us to read his poem against Milton’s, and their refusal to stand in line suggests that Milton’s scheme of loss and restoration has not been rewritten as much as it has been digested, revolved into something new by Wordsworth’s experience.
The philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes of modernity as a reoccupation of religious conceptions of politics and ethics—against Carl Schmitt and others who posit that modernity offers Christian morality in a new guise, essentially unchanged. And this, I think, is how Wordsworth’s Books 9 and 10 need to be read: the terms of Milton’s poetry are not applied to new circumstances, but are instead entirely reoccupied, gaining new meaning. Wordsworth’s Biblical references invoke Milton in order to establish the proper distance between them: this is what the Revolution means, this is what the Revolution has allowed.
“God” is present in the poem and in Wordsworth’s sense of the world but is so diffused through all life and being that it might be said instead that all of the faculties of human thought are instead concentrated in so broad a conception of God: the capacity of the imagination to think what-is-not as well as what-is, to perceive the universal in the individual and to retrieve an individual from the universal, to discern change in permanence and permanence in change, and all of the metaphysical musculature that allows thought of what is natural and unnatural, good, beautiful, true, and strong in the world. All of the various persons and conflicts in Milton’s poem are contained in Wordsworth’s within humankind, and all of humankind is contained within his self-conscious education in humanity. (The poem is an epic prefiguration of Hegel’s Phenomenology, born from the same revolutionary rupture). “Nature” comes most broadly to occupy the space of “God,” in Wordsworth’s poem, nature which is “in the very world which is the world | Of all of us, the place which in the end| We find our happiness, or not at all.”
There is one way of reading Books 9 and 10, then, in which Wordsworth, reared in natural scenes which impressed themselves on his heart, was drawn to France and its revolutionary ideals because they kindled a renewal of what Nature had already implanted there, but from which Wordsworth, by his education and maturation, had grown estranged; the ideals of the Revolution, ultimately disappointing Wordsworth, falling from him, restored him to those natural scenes, allowed him as it were to reoccupy their significance, in a “second love” (l. 394). In short form, the Revolution forced Wordsworth to draw upon what Nature had already impressed within him, and in its failure, and the disillusionment he experienced with France, he recognized that Nature offered solace still, a ground of hope that could not yet be realized politically. In terms of his native England, he finds beneath “the degradation of this age” (l. 928) a landscape that is more profoundly true to what it should and shall become.
But another reading is possible, and one that suggests that Wordsworth recognizes a value to political experience beyond disillusionment: on this reading, Wordsworth takes his time in France as an education, not in the mechanisms of political power or policy, as when he begins “to think with fervour upon management| Of nations, what is and ought to be,| And how their worth depended on their laws| And on the constitution of the state” (ll. 685-88). His education is instead one that leads him to the realization that he is a poet, “one not destitute | of promise” (Book 10 ll. 511-12), confirmed finally in this essential identity of his “true self” when he reunites with his sister Dorothy:
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A poet, made me seek beneath that name,
My office upon earth, and nowhere else.
And lastly, nature’s self, by human love
Assisted, through the weary labyrinth
Conducted me again to open day,
Revived the feelings of my earlier life,
Gave me that strength and knowledge full of peace,
Enlarged and never more to be disturbed,
Which through the steps of our degeneracy,
All degradation of this age, hath still
Upheld me, and upholds me at this day
In the catastrophe (for so they dream,
And nothing less) when, finally to close
And rivet up the gains of France, a Pope
Is summoned in to crown an Emperor—
This last opprobrium, when we see the dog
Returning to his vomit; when the sun
That rose in splendour, was alive, and moved
In exultation among living clouds
Hath put his function and his glory off,
And, turned into a gewgaw, a machine,
Sets like an opera phantom. (Book 10 ll. 919-940).
She saves him, that is, from a disillusionment in poetry commensurate with his disillusionment in political progress. But why would these be so dependent on one another? During his time in France, he does not write verse; after his return, he only barely begins; he has instead dabbled in what he comes to feel is an airy and empty Godwinian rational philosophy. His embrace of poetry is, in what we know of his biography as well as what he tells us in this autobiography, inseparable from the political experience of these years, but why would it be that the continuing fall of France, the disappointment of aggressive war yielding to the farcical self-crowning of Napoleon as Emperor, challenges that identity, given that he has returned to nature, discovered anew what he claims is the true source of his power and inspiration?
An answer lies in what the education in France brought him, enduring beyond the dashed hopes of the Revolution: a language of liberty and freedom. Here, too, we may think that Wordsworth, invoking Milton, the great defender of British liberty, possessed already such a language. But Wordsworth knew that the language of the revolution, and above all, its insistence on the foundation of “natural rights” was novel, in force if not entirely in expression. The French Revolution reoccupied an older inheritance of classical republican and modern liberal rhetoric, and in so doing, allowed Wordsworth to reorient and revive the same rhetoric in a poetry that, even though it could find no suitable opportunity in the civic and political life of England, might live in the scenes of nature to which he had returned.
And we see evidence of this not only in the books following the Revolution, but in the entire poem, all of which was written after the experiences of Books 9 and 10. It is thanks to these years, in other words, that Wordsworth could write in the opening lines of Book 1:
Now I am free, enfranchised and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will. (Book 10 ll. 9-11).
“Enfranchised” means one thing after the metaphor of a “house of bondage,” but it means something more profoundly democratic and republican in light of the revolution. It is not the case that the words themselves were new to Wordsworth, but that they became something else. In a figure he offers in Book 10 of an elation he felt upon his return to Britain in the 1790s, hopeful that it would reform:
In brief a child of nature as at first,
Diffusing only those affections wider
That from the cradle had grown up with me,
And losing, in no other way than light
Is lost in light, the weak in the more strong. (Book 10 ll. 752-756)
Similarly, the English words associated with freedom came to be like light lost in light, their weak senses enveloped in the stronger senses they possessed in France.
Though it has previously struck me as a conspicuously toothless explanation of his decision to visit France in the early stages of the Revolution, Wordsworth tells us just this: that he went to France to learn the language. But this seemingly glib remark, smack of assumed naivety, as if he had no awareness of what was unfolding there, is in fact profoundly honest:
I quitted, and betook myself to France,
Led thither chiefly by a personal wish
To speak the language more familiarly,
With which intent I chose for my abode
A city on the borders of the Loire.(Book 9 ll. 35-9)
The prim dignity of the lines, of a piece with a smug and self-satisfied middle-class traveler in a novel by Dickens, serves a double purpose: symptomatizing the blinkered provincialism of young Wordsworth before he went to France, and uttering a truth deeper than he knew at the time. As the world opens out before him in France, so the meaning of the phrase, “to speak the language more familiarly” will evolve over his time there. He does learn to do so but does not know what this will mean.
This is the other plot of these books: one in which he learns what the concepts and words of the Revolution mean, suffers a disenchanted alienation not only from them, but from the language by which he can account for, and orient, his place in the world, and then discovers again how to speak, recovering the language of the revolution in the natural scenes of England and in the familiar second-person address to his friend, Coleridge (his interlocutor in the poem), and his sister, Dorothy (who saved him as a poet). When Wordsworth exults “in the triumph” of his soul and feels, simultaneously, grief, only to arrive in “a conflict of feelings without name,” we are witnessing this falling away from language and feeling alike.
What he would have absorbed all else is a profound sense of “nature” that underscores the key phrase of radical rhetoric: “natural rights.” Anyone with even the most fleeting familiarity with Wordsworth will recognize him as a poet of nature, and a great deal of criticism has addressed just what this means, not least because of the enormity of the word “nature,” not just in Wordsworth but in English. Of course, his encounter with nature as a foundation to a virtuous and thriving human life, on the scale of a small mountain village, would have been met with in Rousseau. But his time in France during the revolution would have done much more to help him see into the latent political significance of this word.
Dan Edelstein’s work is invaluable here. The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & The French Revolution argues that the acceleration of violence in the French Revolution owes not to an abandonment of legal and political reasoning, but to a political philosophy that would dispense with the apparatus of the constitution and attempt instead to establish a Republic guided by laws of nature, directly. ii “The Jacob variant” of Republican theory, Edelstein writes, “sought to govern by nature’s laws alone,” and as such is a “mutant strain” from the main Republican tradition. The mutation could happen in France because the central legal traditions in France did not draw upon natural law theory: it was “not part of French law school curricula, as it was in England, Switzerland, Germany, or the Netherlands” (6-7). Though “the language and concepts of natural right were…in open circulation throughout France…so detached were these concepts from actual legal practices…that their meaning and relations could be easily redefined” (8). For Edelstein, “the identification of nature and nation…lay at the heart of Jacobin republicanism” (19). His argument finds consistency in the chaotic swerves of the policy of the Committee of Public Safety: “The Terror legislation therefore was not a matter of suspending the law but of substituting one body of law for another—natural right for the penal code—under extraordinary circumstances” (20). Central to the notion of a natural law is a common humanity, but, paradoxically to our ears, it was just this notion of common humanity that permitted those who opposed it to be dispensed with by execution: they were enemies of humanity (“humani generis hostes”), monstrosities, who by violating natural law were in turn exempt from the protection it granted. The king was accounted thus when he was executed. Rousseau is a fascinating and ambivalent figure in this tradition, presenting a defense of natural law in some works (Emile and Julie) and apparently rejecting it as adequate grounds for the state in The Social Contract—he cannot be read simply as a proponent of natural law, since he “recognized that society was rife with contradictions and sought to resolve them through a dialectical synthesis of natural right and republican good” (84). Nor was “natural law” a static ideal: through the eighteenth century, its force shifted, and helped shift, a conception of a golden age in which humankind was able to live in harmony with itself, according to decrees set by nature itself.
“By the time of the French Revolution, the myth of the golden age no longer appeared to many as a myth; it had become the ideal and natural template on whose basis all of society could be reorganized” (14), Edelstein writes, later explaining that “during the first year of the French Republic, it was commonplace to compare the nascent government to ‘those days that can be called the true golden age.’” This was the early Revolutionary France that Wordsworth experienced firsthand. The potency of the myth was such that it was felt as a possibility, just one remove from reality, such that “all aspects of Jacobin legislative activity, be they penal, civil, or institutional, seem to have been grounded in the same authorizing referent: nature” (21). The ideal of “the natural republic” was inseparable, “after the downfall of the monarchy” from the myth (88), and it was this ideal, a Republic that could sustain itself even in the absence of a constitution (Saint Just proposed as much in private writings), that Edelstein suggests would have made the abrupt suspension of the constitution in 1794 more than a cynical power grab. Wordsworth’s experience of the early Revolutionary France would have been saturated by appeals to nature that, even if similar to what he found in Rousseau, would have gone further, had deeper and more potent political implications for the present, and would have demanded he reckon anew with the contours and extent of the word, “nature,” itself. The return to Nature in the final books of The Prelude is a return to the word itself, not cleansed of its revolutionary rhetoric, but accommodating its possibility in a broader and stronger unity. Nature does, for Wordsworth, provide something like a natural law, and Wordsworth looks to the possibility of a common humanity: “on man, the heart of man, and human life” as he writes in “Michael” (which in French is “Michel,” one of the most important of France’s patron saints).
In France, then, Wordsworth learned something new about the word “nature,” and learned also something about what it means to learn a language—and what it means to lose a language that one has learned, to feel the words of the revolution turning against themselves, their ideals coming undone by the power they are asked to serve. In the 1850 edition of The Prelude, its first public appearance in England, Wordsworth removed a substantial section at the end of Book 9, in which he narrates the story of Vaudracour and Julia. Vaudracour, from humble origins, impregnates Julia, whose father denies them the chance to marry; Julia dies; Vaudracour raises the infant with an elderly nurse in the solitude of the forest, until the infant dies too, and Vaudracour descends into a silent stupor:
From that time forth he never uttered word
To any living. An inhabitant
Of that same town in which the pair had left
So lively a remembrance of their griefs
By chance of business coming within reach
Of his retirement, to the spot repaired
With the intent to visit him; he reached
The house and only found the matron there,
Who told him that his pains were thrown away,
For that her master never uttered word
To living soul—not even to her. Behold
While they were speaking, Vaudracour approached,
But, seeing someone there, just as his hand
Was stretched towards the garden-gate, he shrunk,
And like a shadow glided out of view.
Shocked at his savage outside, from the place
The visitor retired.
Thus lived the youth,
Cut off from all intelligence with man,
And shunning even the light of common day.
Nor could the voice of freedom, which through France
Soon afterwards resounded, public hope,
Or personal memory of his own deep wrongs,
Rouse him; but in those solitary shades
His days he wasted—an imbecile mind. (Book 9 ll. 912-35)
The story of Vaudracour and Julia is a thinly veiled retelling of Wordsworth’s own affair in France with Annette Vallon, which resulted in his fathering an illegitimate child, Caroline; he could not see her for years after he left, and this end to Vaudracour’s story can plausibly be read as an expression of grief and guilt. But it seems to be doing something else, too. Taking the story on its own, divorced from Wordsworth’s biography, it is a tale of the sort of class-based hierarchy that the Revolution sought to undo: what is threatened is not just true love but the true family, that of Vaudracour and Julia (whose name is not far from Rousseau’s Julie). In the myth of the golden age, such a true family could become a sort of naturalized political unit, as Edelstein sees in Fénelon’s novel, Telemachus, which guided the spirit of natural Republicanism earlier than Rousseau (it is one of two books Rousseau deems suitable for children, in Emile). He quotes from the novel: “every family is governed by its head, who is in reality its king.” Nor is this a proto-absolutist arrangement. Though patriarchal, it is Republican in spirit, Edelstein explains: “these heads of households do not wield anything like absolute power: they always consult with the rest of the family before deciding on a form of punishment, when needed” (59). There is, then, an affirmation of a sort of natural political existence that lurks behind Wordsworth’s story, one that came into fruition too early for the Revolution’s winds; it was blighted before the “voice of freedom” could reach it. The guilt and grief are historical as well as personal; the Revolution happened in the wrong time, or with the wrong timing. Something potentially valuable—something Wordsworth would recreate in his familial life in the Lake District during the first decade of the 1800s—was lost not just to him but to France.
The failure of Revolutionary timing results not just in sorrow but in muteness: language that is taken away, abandoned by Vaudracour, who, in this respect, is not Wordsworth. The narrative is a third person not merely to disguise a source of potential public embarrassment for the poet, but to contrast with the path Wordsworth takes. In the second half of Book Ten, though, he narrates how near he came to falling from that path. Upon his return to England, Wordsworth watches the course of events turn this way and that, sees the reactionary critics of France, whom he despised, justified in some respects, and faces the impossible task of disentangling the viability and validity of the Revolution’s ideals from cynical exploitation of those ideals. Bewildered and exhausted, he is led to Godwin’s abstruse rational philosophy, only to find further exhaustion and bewilderment:
Time may come
When some dramatic story may afford
Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my friend,
What then I learned, or think I learned, of truth,
And the errors into which I was betrayed
By present objects, and by reasonings false
From the beginning, inasmuch as drawn
Out of a heart which had been turned aside
From nature by external accidents,
And which was thus confounded more and more,
Misguiding and misguided. Thus I fared,
Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith.
Like culprits to the bar; suspiciously
Calling the mind 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 moral obligation—what the rule
And what the sanction—till, demanding 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
And for my future studies, as the sole
Employment of the enquiring faculty,
Turned towards mathematics, and their clear
And solid evidence.(Book 10 ll. 878-904)
Mathematics is not the “imbecile” silence of Vaudracour, but it represents a turn away from language, which lacks, inherently, the “clear and solid evidence” of mathematics. At this time, he says, a return to nature would have saved him, the “external accidents” that confounded him having led him to an interrogation of right and wrong that resembles the legalistic reasoning of a fallen age, distant from the natural republic of the heart. Even if Rousseau might have provided him with this language, in light of Edelstein’s argument, we cannot see this invocation of “nature” as somehow innocent or divorced from the most extreme currents of revolutionary politics. And in light of what “nature” (the word, not the substance or stuff or whatever it is) suffered by the “external accidents” of the Revolution, we can better understand why he grew alienated from it, and why he required the friendship of Coleridge and his sister’s love to lead him back to the very idea of it, and to help him reoccupy the concept of “nature” with the pure, egalitarian passions of the heart, exemplified by friendship and by the (revolutionary-inflected) fraternity that is a brother’s duty to a sister.
In the tenth book of Paradise Lost, Adam addresses God and himself, blaming both for the fall he has suffered. In the torrent of self-reproach and accusation, he learns anew how to speak, and the magnificence of the poetry he utters show him finding strength in his newly vulnerable plight. He discovers a postlapsarian possibility of speech. In the earlier books, Milton has revealed his own strength as a poet in imagining a prelapsarian existence in a fallen language. For instance, he describes Eve’s “wanton ringlets,” where “wanton” includes in its local significance the reminder that this word does not yet mean anything sinful: he invents the proleptic anti-pun, whereby the reader encounters words that “mean-X-but-not-yet-Y.”iii When Adam and Eve fall, the language falls with them, and the poetry of Books 11 and 12 is experienced by some even as a disappointment after Adam’s furious outpouring. Book 10, then, marks a turn in the story about language that Milton tells, as well as the language in which he tells his story.
Similarly, Book Ten marks a turning point in the story of language in The Prelude: but the language of nature that almost fell during the revolution is instead redeemed, even if its political potential remains unrealized. “Nature” has been harrowed by experience, but it is this same “nature” (the word as well as the world) that allows Wordsworth to heal from the harrowing experience he undergone; and in so doing, it is recovered in a form that can endure the vicissitudes of “external accident”:
When I began at first in early youth
To yield myself to nature, when that strong
And holy passion overcame me first,
Neither the day nor night, evening or morn,
Were free from the oppression. But, great God,
Who sendest thyself into this breathing world
Through nature and through every kind of life,
And makest man what he is—creature divine,
In single or in social eminence,
Above all these raised infinite ascents
When reason enables him to be
Is not sequestered—what a change is here!
How different ritual for this after-worship,
What countenance to promote this second love!
That first was service but to things which lie
At rest within the bosom of thy will;
Therefore to serve was high beatitude,
The tumult was a gladness, and the fear
Ennobling, venerable—sleep secure,
And waking thoughts more rich than happiest dreams. (Book 10 ll. 381-400)
We can and should take “early youth” to refer to those scenes of the first books of the poem, Wordsworth’s youngest memories of fear and awe at the sublimity of the natural world. But if we admit that Wordsworth’s “early youth” might extend to the early years of the Revolution, then we can hear in a different key the assertion that “the tumult was a gladness” and the “the fear ennobling.” These might seem instead celebrations of the worship of nature in France, yielding a social tumult that at first inspired, and a fear that, perhaps even in the intention of those who planned the terror, might ennoble and train the population into Republican virtues. We might also read in the enjambment of “that first was service but to things which lie” the brief acknowledgement that these revolutionary myths and ideals were “things which lie,” deceiving and disappointing Wordsworth in turn. On this reading, “sleep secure” is the sleep of his first days in France and in Paris; the change happens when, well before the Terror proper, he returns, an event he narrates earlier in the same book:
This was the time in which, inflamed with hope,
To Paris I returned. Again I ranged,
More eagerly than I had done before,
Through the wide city, and in progress passed
The prison where the unhappy monarch lay,
Associate with his children and his wife
In bondage, and the palace, lately stormed
With roar of cannon and a numerous host
I crossed (a black and empty area then)
The Square of the Carrousel, few weeks back
Heaped up with dead and dying—upon these
And other sights looking as doth a man
Upon a volume whose contents he knows
Are memorable but from him locked up,
Being written in a tongue he cannot read,
So that he questions the mute leaves with pain
And half upbraids their silence. But that night
When on my bed I lay, I was most moved
And felt most deeply in what world I was.
My room was high and lonely, near the roof
Of a large mansion or hotel, a spot
That would have pleased me in more quiet times—
Nor was it wholly without pleasure then.
With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals. The fear gone by
Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.
I thought of those September massacres,
Divided from me by a little month,
And felt and touched them, a substantial dread
(The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions
And mournful calendars of true history,
Remembrances and dim admonishments):
‘The horse is taught his manage, and the wind
Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps;
Year follows year, the tide returns again,
Day follows day, all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once!’
And in such a way I wrought upon myself
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried
To the whole city ‘Sleep no more!’ To this
Add comments of a calmer mind, from which
I could not gather full security,
But at the best it seemed a place of fear
Unfit for the repose of night,
Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.(Book 10 ll. 38-82)
“Sleep secure” becomes “Sleep no more,” the echo of Macbeth an intimation of the Terror (“the fear gone by | Pressed on me almost like a fear to come”) that Wordsworth retrospectively perceives in these September Massacres. We are presented with the moment in which the ennobling fear and pleasure of tumult have spoiled, yielding dread. But these early feelings remain present, not entirely obscured by the rot: “Felt and touched them” carries more than a frisson of giddy excitement as well as dread, and “nor was it wholly without pleasure then” grants what remained of the earlier fervor.
Another loss is more profound: Vaudracour’s muteness is picked up in the description of his arrival at Carrousel. The locked-up text is the recent past, the bodies now removed, their full significance impossible for him to recover. He is experiencing the acceleration of time, the meaning of events shifting, being lost or transformed, almost as soon as they happen. He is also, however, experiencing a dislocation from the language of the revolution itself: the leaves of the book are “mute,” the language that could make sense of events no longer accessible. The quotation in this passage—a note in the Penguin Classics edition remarks that it is unlike anything Wordsworth ever wrote—is both interior monologue and interpretation: its strangeness registers and dramatizes his illiteracy, forcing it in part on the reader, suggesting a style or mode that is incompatible with the rest of the poem. It is a fall from language brought on by an awareness of the fall of language, with Wordsworth’s entire poem testifying to his redemption from the fall, and redemption of the language as well as the ideals it harbors.
The republican potential of “nature” is not—cannot be, given what the word has been meant—be absent in the closing passage of the poem, addressed to Coleridge:
Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace in the knowledge which we have,
Blest with true happiness if we may be
United helpers forward of a day
Of firmer trust, joint labourers in a work—
Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe—
Of their redemption, surely yet to come.
Prophets of nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason and by truth. What we have loved
Others will love, and we may teach them how—
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolutions in the hopes
And fears of men, does still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of substance and of fabric more divine. (Book 13 ll. 430-52)
“Prophets of nature” takes up the mantle that the French Republic had let fall, proclaiming it to reside deeper in the “mind of man” than the “revolutions in the hopes and fears of men” brought on by the Revolution he had lived to see fail, but which at least broke humankind free from the “old idolatry” to which it threatens once more to cling. The “you” here is Coleridge, but it is also perhaps self-address, Wordsworth reflecting on the completion of a poem that has, in its very writing, restored “nature” to its political potential, ready for when the time is right.