On July 13, 1790, the day before the people of Paris celebrated the storming of the Bastille, Wordsworth left with a friend—Tom Wedgwood—planning to cross France and travel to Switzerland.
The two travelers later met representatives returning from Paris, and the two young men were warmly invited by their hospitable hosts to join them for dinner.
France had won Wordsworth's heart from the very beginning of the Revolution. He believed that France's prosperity would advance the welfare of mankind, and for a time he lost interest in British affairs, even remaining indifferent to Britain's failure to abolish the slave trade.
This was love's true opposite—indifference. Wordsworth even wrote a poem to commemorate it:
For I returned with this belief: if France's cause went smoothly, the respect good men bore for humanity would not always be in vain;
Though this branch of mankind's shame was the most rotten, seeming an extra affliction, if the great tree were felled, it too would fall.
Many Europeans believed Britain was free, but in truth, many Britons had no choice but to remain in this "land of freedom" because they could not scrape together the fare for a ship to America.
People placed the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor as a symbol of freedom. Whenever those European immigrants saw her, they would cry "America!" with the excitement of lost sailors catching sight of a lighthouse.
Wordsworth was full of hope for France and saw it as the dawn. Thus, when he heard that Britain had joined the Anti-French Coalition and even joined the ranks of the invaders, he was greatly enraged. He wrote poems condemning it; in his eyes, Britain's actions opposed France's independence and freedom.
Napoleon's birthday in 1802 was not a pleasant one. Wordsworth was there too, and he witnessed the