At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not quote the _Borderers_ for a reason which will be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the _Prelude_, and the _Excursion_ is decisive. “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, “and read _Godwin on Necessity_”’ (Hazlitt’s _Spirit of the Age_, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a question, important historically, but more important to ourselves privately, whether Wordsworth’s temporary subjugation by _Political Justice_ was due to pure intellectual conviction. I think not. Coleridge noticed that Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria. He complains that during the Scotch tour in 1803 ‘Wordsworth’s hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred.’ He again says to Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has ‘occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,’ and that he has a ‘hypochondriacal graft in his nature.’ Wordsworth himself speaks of times when—
‘ . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came; Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.’
During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria must have been greatly encouraged. His hopes in the Revolution had begun to fail, but the declaration of war against France made him wretched. He wandered about from place to place, unable to conjecture what his future would be. ‘I have been doing nothing,’ he tells Matthews, ‘and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not.’ He proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the _Philanthropist_, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease assumes. The _Political Justice_ found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.