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When the French Revolution occurred in 1789 it was greeted with enthusiasm by most English artists and intellectuals.

The young poet William Wordsworth was no exception. He was a radical liberal at the time, as is shown by the following lines he wrote in a poem supporting the Revolution:

Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,
Was bless'd as free ─ for he was Nature's child.
He, all superior but his God disdained,
Walk'd none restraining, and by none restrained,
Confessed no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wish'd, and wish'd but what he ought.

What this poem is claiming is that man was originally free, in the liberal sense, in having no impediments to individual will and reason. This is what is meant when Wordsworth asserts that natural Man "Did all he wish'd" and was "by none restrained" and that natural Man followed only what his own "reason taught".

Wordsworth, and many like him, believed at the time that the French Revolution would destroy tyranny and return to man his original, natural liberty as described above.

One of the few dissenting voices to criticise the French Revolution was that of the Englishman Edmund Burke. He warned that the revolutionaries were not returning man to his true nature, but were at war with it. When the revolutionaries unleashed the Terror to consolidate their power, Burke's more pessimistic view of the Revolution was vindicated.

Wordsworth came to reject the Revolution and developed a more conservative political philosophy. His mature conservatism is evident in the lines he wrote in honour of Edmund Burke in his major work The Prelude.

I see him ─ old, but vigorous in age, ─
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But some ─
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems based on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born
                         (The Prelude 519-529)

The conservatism of these lines is that they reject the idea that individual reason should rule unimpeded. This is because of the importance of things that individual reason does not, and cannot, create, such as time hallowed laws and institutes, customary social ties and inherited allegiances.  Wordsworth, and Burke, are willing to defend such aspects of a particular tradition against the abstract theories of the reasoning intellect working alone.

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