1793
The Wanderer
Pt II

January 1793: Publication of two long poems

It's clear that Wordsworth had imbibed revolutionary fervour during his stay in France, and his long poem Descriptive Sketches, published in January 1793 by Joseph Johnson, though it is primarily a long description of his walking tour of the alps with his friend Jones, rises to a crescendo of revolutionary rhetoric at the end:

_Tho' Liberty shall soon, indignant, raise
Red on his hills his beacon's comet blaze;
Bid from on high his lonely cannon sound,
And on ten thousand hearths his shout rebound;
His larum-bell from village-tow'r to tow'r
Swing on th'astounded ear its dull undying roar:
Yet, yet rejoice, tho' Pride's perverted ire
Rouze Hell's own aid, and wrap thy hills in fire.
Lo! from th'innocuous flames, a lovely birth!
With its own Virtues springs another earth:
Nature, as in her prime, her virgin reign
Begins, and Love and Truth compose her train:
With pulseless hand, and fix'd unwearied gaze,
Unbreathing Justice her still beam surveys:
No more, along thy vales and viny groves,
Whole hamlets disappearing as he moves,
With cheeks o'er spread by smiles of baleful glow,
On his pale horse shall fell Consumption go.

Wordsworth here presents us with Liberty, Pride, Hell, Virtue, Nature, Justice and Consumption all jumbled together in an apocalyptic hotch-potch. We are not dealing with human beings here; abstractions are battling it out in an unreal world where fire gives birth to another earth, and Nature begins her 'virgin reign', absurd, conflicted images couched in language which seems designed to obscure meaning. It was neither likely to succeed in the marketplace nor trouble the government.

March 1793: Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff

But Wordsworth persists in putting himself forward as a polemicist, penning a Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff in response to the Bishop's abandonment of the revolutionary cause which he had previously espoused wholeheartedly.

In a detailed analysis of the similarities between Wordsworth's Letter and Tom Paine's Rights of Man published in two parts in March 1791 and February 1792, Edward Niles Hooker (ENH) points out that:

It is reasonably clear that Wordsworth, having read Paine, was sufficiently impressed by both his ideas and his brilliance in expressing them, that he involuntarily introduced many of the ideas and even some of the phraseology into his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff.

At all events, the letter was not published until 1876, and Wordsworth left London in May for a tour of the West Country with William Calvert, a friend from Hawkshead School who had recently received a legacy.