Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
Oh! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone,
He doth sit by us and moan.
There is our mystic yet again leading the way.
A supreme regard for science, and the worship of power, go hand in hand:
that knowledge is power has been esteemed the grandest incitement to
study. Yet the antidote to the disproportionate cultivation of science,
is simply power in its crude form--breaking out, that is, as brute force.
When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only
for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific
proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the wild beast in man
breaks from its den, and chaos returns. But all the noblest minds in
Europe looked for grand things in the aurora of this uprising of the
people. To the terrible disappointment that followed, we are indebted for
the training of Wordsworth to the priesthood of nature's temple. So was
he possessed with the hope of a coming deliverance for the nations, that
he spent many months in France during the Revolution. At length he was
forced to seek safety at home. Dejected even to hopelessness for a time,
he believed in nothing.
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