Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;
But to be young was very heaven. O times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance.
Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at
Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing
at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.
signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath
of fidelity to the new constitution. In the following year Wordsworth
revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy
with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris
not long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days,
too, in which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters
at Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the
banks of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for
going to war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met
one another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called
the Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of
Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated.
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