ments, annihilated as to the Past, they are dead to the future, or seek the proofs of it everywhere, only not (where alone they can be found) in themselves.

Writing in 1809, Coleridge singled out Wordsworth as the poet who had "exprest and illustrated this sentiment with equal firmness of thought and feeling." Wordsworth himself spoke of his work as an attempt to explore the "fructifying," "vivifying," or "renovating virtue" of memory. ^* Especially in The Prelude, he treated the immediacy of the child's experience of "fear and love" as the ground and basis of later experience, the source of mature insight; and it does not seem utterly implausible to suppose that rigorous, unsentimental attention to childhood memories served something of the same end in Wordsworth's Romanticism—notwithstanding all the obvious differences between the two traditions— that a celebration of founding fathers served in classical republicanism, opening thought to a sense of the gravity and joy of existence, more specifically to an awareness of its origins and its indebtedness to the past, and thus reawakening the capacity for devotion. ^†

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*

A demonstration of Wordsworth's fascination with memory would require a book in its own right. For our purposes, it is enough to note that the very structure of The Prelude—its plot, if you will—illustrates the triumph of early memories over the political "idolatry" to which Wordsworth succumbed in his enthusiasm for the French revolution as well as their capacity to sustain hope in the midst of the "melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown" by the revolution's failure. Coleridge had urged Wordsworth to write a narrative poem "addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary pbilosopbes." That Wordsworth's response should have been a work that celebrates the restorative force of memory seems to me to indicate a deepening of political understanding rather than a retreat from it, as so many have argued, or the assertion of an uncritical loyalty to Britain.

†

This supposition gains support from Wordsworth's repeated identification of memory with "virtue." Thus he speaks of Sicily, where Coleridge was living at the time Wordsworth composed one of the many drafts of The Prelude, as a land strewn "with the wreck of loftier years" but "lost" to the "reanimating influence" of "memory"— "to virtue lost and hope." Here "virtue" retains its explicitly political connotations, as

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