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MADAME ROLAND REVEALS HERSELF.
The year 1790 brought with it a promise of conciliation and concord. Not in France only were the best natures full of faith in the future, but all over Europe the hearts of men turned with yearning expectation towards the land where mankind seemed taking a fresh start in its development. In England, above all, the sympathy with the French people was widely diffused. The same generous enthusiasm prevailed which blazed forth in 1860 on the liberation of Italy by Garibaldi. Something deeper still, for, as Wordsworth wrote,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! Oh times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in Romance!
Wordsworth, in those days drawn across the Channel, nourished such glorious visions of the coming change that the reaction from them overclouded his mind for years, and throw him —as, indeed, it did half that generation- into the opposite ranks of reaction. Coleridge, the future leader of nineteenth-century Toryism, dreamed of establishing a Pantisocrasy on the banks
