THE CONSTITUTIONS OF BELIEF

Imagine a procession, William Wordsworth asked his friend John Scott in a letter of 1816, in which Lord Holland and members of the political “opposition” walk through a series of British monuments. “Give them credit for feeling the utmost and best that they are capable of feeling in connection with these venerable and sacred places, and say frankly whether you would be at all satisfied with the result.” Like the badgering narrators so familiar from his own poetry, Wordsworth is not satisfied to pose the question only once. He continues to ask it – but in slightly different ways. Presented with a view of an “English landscape diversified with spires and church towers and hamlets,” would Holland and his cohorts have “a becoming reverence of the English character?” And finally: “Do they value as they ought – and even as their opponents do – the constitution of the country, in Church and State?”

It may seem unlikely that any of Wordsworth's correspondents in 1816 could have doubted what his response might have been to such questions. After all, this was the author of The Excursion (1814), the nine-book epic poem swelling with praise for the constitution of the country in church and state. His patriotic verse appeared in The Champion, later to be collected in his 1807 Poems in Two Volumes as “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,” and in future editions as “Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.”