But they connected these views so closely with their views in metaphysics and theology, that the association with Burke was effectually disguised.
The only English writer of that age whom we can name along with Burke in the literature of enduring power, is Wordsworth, that great representative in another and a higher field, and with many rare elements added that were all his own of those harmonising and conciliatory forces and ideas that make man's destiny easier to him, through piety in its oldest and best sense; through reverence for the past, for duty, for institutions.

He was born in the year of the _Present Discontents_ (1770), and when Burke wrote the _Reflections_, Wordsworth was standing, with France "on the top of golden hours," listening with delight among the ruins of the Bastille, or on the banks of the Loire, to "the homeless sound of joy that was in the sky." When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon had built his throne on their grave, he began to see those strong elements which for Burke had all his life been the true and fast foundation of the social world.

Wide as is the difference between an oratorical and a declamatory mind like Burke's, and the least oratorical of all poets, yet under this difference of form and temper there is a striking likeness in spirit.

There was the same energetic feeling about moral ideas, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectual knowledge, and even the same ruling sympathy with that side of the character of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as "_their awe of kings and reverence for priests," "their sullen resistance of innovation" "their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom of prejudice_." The conservative movement in England ran on for many years in the ecclesiastical channel rather than among questions where Burke's writings might have been brought to bear.

On the political side the most active minds, both in practice and theory, worked out the principles of liberalism, and they did so on a plan and by methods from which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historic conservatism were equally remote.