However, the poems privilege different kinds of landscapes as well contrasting approaches to the Revolution. The natural landscape figures prominently in both Smith's and Wordsworth's poems, but the landscape of solitary exiles dominates The Emigrants, whereas the imaginative landscape permeates Descriptive Sketches. Smith begins in solitary despair and ends with a call for renewed hope through united political reform. Wordsworth, however, progresses from enthusiasm to melancholy in Descriptive Sketches; his energetic support for the Revolution is adulterated by his specific encounters with the inhabitants of France and Switzerland. Smith modifies the usual Romantic privileging of the solitary by rejecting seclusion as a rejuvenating agent. She find s hope for reform through her interaction with the ÈmigrÈs and by assimilating their experiences to her own. Wordsworth, however, eschews these kinds of interactions, preferring to emphasize his imagination and its wanderings. The melancholic ending to Descriptive Sketches seems to suggest the negative effects of solitude on hope for a renewed community.

In a rhetorical move anticipating a discussion of the ÈmigrÈs, Smith opens her poem with a dreary description of the landscape as day breaks:

	Slow the Wintry Morn, the struggling light 
	Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves; 
	Their foaming tips, as they approach the shore 
	And the broad	surf that never ceasing breaks 
	On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams 
	Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives 
	To this cold northern Isle, its shorten'd day. 
	Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy! (I.1-8)

The light struggles to illuminate the earth; the "pale Sun" reluctantly commences the new day. This introductory meditation on the landscape highlights the importance of both the solitary in and the sublimity of nature. Smith begins this contemplation o n nature with what would become typically Wordsworthian as she writes,

	How often do I half abjure Society,

	And sigh for some lone cottage, deep embower'd 
	In the green woods, that these steep chalking Hills 
	Guard from the strong South West. . . . (I.42-45)

For Smith, however, this quest for solitude has very different results from those of Wordsworth. She is seeking seclusion from a society fraught with injustice and tyranny, while Wordsworth seeks solitude in nature as a restorative agent for the imaginat ion. Smith writes that "not the Cot sequester'd, where the briar / And the wood-bine wild, embrace the mossy thatch . . . / . . .Can shut out for an hour the spectre Care" (I.75-76, 90). Smith's rejection of finding refuge in nature denies the usual Rom antic investment in nature as rejuvenating, and thus another means of achieving peace must be found.

Wordsworth, by contrast, begins Descriptive Sketches with a much more inviting picture of the natural landscape. He commences the poem by describing "a spot of holy ground" (1) that "By Pain and her sad family unfound, / Sure Nature's God that spot to man had giv'n (2-3). In Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth does not conclude this section with a reflection of man's fallenness leading to a desire for escape in Nature from society. Instead, he views this secluded spot as an intrinsic resting place

	Where falls the purple morning far and wide 
	In flakes of light upon the mountain-side; 
	Where summer Suns in ocean sink to rest, 
	Or moonlight Upland lifts her hoary breast. . . . (5-8).

"Doubly pitying Nature" also helps assuage man's emotional suffering; its "charities his steps attend, [and] / In every babbling brook he finds a friend" (28-29). For Wordsworth, man is able to regain some of his lost innocence in nature, but he does not have to seek out this restorative entity; nature gives it freely. This is quite a different attitude from Smith who writes of nature's inability to shut out the "spectre Care" (Emigrants I.90). However, despite Wordsworth's delight in such retreats, the French and Swiss landscapes were severely scarred by the French Revolution, while the English landscape remained unspoiled. Wordsworth mournfully observes,

	--Thy fragrant gales and lute-resounding streams, 
	Breathe o'er the failing soul voluptuous dreams; 
	While Slavery [forces] the sunk mind to dwell 
	On joys that might disgrace the captive's cell. . . . (156-59)

Wordsworth, writing these verses two years after the actual walking tour, could not help but be influenced by his exposure to revolutionary politics and the ravages of war-torn France. Thus, he vacillates between Edenic scenes unstained by greed and tyranny and those in which the landscape is polluted by its spoilers. Wordsworth, unlike Smith, does include political commentary through this bleak pictorialism. His description of the landscape is an inevitable result, according to Williams, for a man who se "personal life in 1792 was running counter to the contemplative frame of mind he wished to assume in order to sustain the poetic structure of feeling [in Descriptive Sketches]" (Williams 38). These contrasting mind-sets of Wordsworth and Smith reveal the way in which Wordsworth positions himself as a poet of nature in a natural landscape that can potentially afford a secluded innocence while Smith, however, orients herself as a poet of a natur al landscape not impervious to society's corruption and pain; nature is unable to provide a haven from injustice.

Smith's personal life helped foster an empathy with the sufferings of the politically oppressed. Her troublesome relationship with her step-mother as well as her later unhappy marriage to Benjamin Smith in 1765 were important conscious-forming events in her life. Smith published The Emigrants in 1793, and in this two-book, blank verse poem, she draws on her personal experiences as she empathizes with the French ÈmigrÈs, who, like Smith, have also suffered hardships and who are forsaken by their own countrymen. In Book I of The Emigrants, the solitary figures permeate the landscape, and even seem to comprise a "human landscape" in the poem. Florence Hilbish, in her biography on Smith, comments that Smith's "quick responsive heart as readily championed .97-98), and now, Prometheus-like they

	disconsolate and sad . . . hang
	Upon the barrier of the rock, and seem
	To murmur their despondence, waiting long 
	Some unfortunate reverse that never comes. . . . (I.108-11) 

Smith compassionately identifies with these emigrants, and her emotional interaction anticipates Wordsworth's spots of time as Smith mingles the ÈmigrÈs' memories with her own.

The Wordsworthian idea of spots of time as memories possessing a "fructifying virtue" (The Prelude (1799) I.291) evolved much later than the writing of either The Emigrants or Descriptive Sketches, but in each of these poems it possible to identify specific passages that interrogate the notion that "in this moment there is life and food / For future years" ("Tintern Abbey" 65- 66). For Smith, the early versions of spots of time consist not only in remembering events in her own life, but also in assimilat ing the experiences of the ÈmigrÈs so that they become her own. In The Emigrants, Smith remembers herself as a young girl by the banks of the river Arun, and she prays, "Memory come! / And from distracting cares, . . . / . . . kindly bear / My fancy to t hose hours of simple joy" (II.328-31). She recalls wading into the river and collecting "aquatic flowers" (II.343), and how this time of youth was unspoiled by oppression and turmoil. However, this childhood memory does not rejuvenate Smith, but instead only makes her long for death where peace will be restored(II.371-73). The solitary figures in The Emigrants also articulate what would be known as spots of time, but as Smith recounts their memories, they become her own. For example, Smith describes t he plight of one female exile as she flees from her oppressors and tries to save her children:

	A wretched Woman, pale and breathless, flies! 
	And, gazing round her, listens to
	the sound Of hostile footsteps(.)
	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
	--[She] Escap'd
	Almost by miracle! Fear, frantic Fear,
	Wing'd her weak feet. . . . (II.258-60, 267-69)

This account resembles Smith's own description of her flight to escape the "fearful spectres of chicane and fraud . . . / [Which have been] pursuing my faint steps" (II.355, 358). Although The British Critic negatively cited Smith for foregrounding her own troubles in a poem purporting to focus on the French ÈmigrÈs (405), Hilbish supports the opinion of the Analytical Review which comments that ">From the immediate subject of [the poem], the author passes, by a natural transition, to her own misfortunes; and if she dwell somewhat too long upon the subject, she will easily be forgiven by those who know how deeply domestic trouble penetrates the feeling heart" (qtd. in Hilbish 153). This statement identifies an underlying tension between domestic and foreign concerns. While Smith's memories of her childhood exist in the domestic realm, concerns of the ÈmigrÈs, while foreign, are transformed into domestic affairs; this assimilation is twofold. First, the French ÈmigrÈs, by their physical presence in Engl and, have interposed their plight by seeking refuge in England. Secondly, Smith claims to identify so closely with their feelings of loneliness and despair, that often it seems that she is talking about herself as she tells the story of each of the exile s. Stuart Curran comments in "The I Altered" that in "an uncanny way Charlotte Smith creates her own identity in the poem by absorbing [the exiles'] emptiness" (201). Smith's empathy with the French emigrants posits her as mediator between the domestic and foreign realms of experience, and as a painter of the dual English and French human landscapes.

Wordsworth's dissimilar precursors to spots of time to those of Smith indicate his bias for privileging the mind's personified actions as opposed to human actions. The solitary wanderers that Wordsworth meets during his tour are vagrants, but they are of a different kind than those that Smith depicts in The Emigrants. Wordsworth's Alpine landscape is only sparsely peopled by these figures, whereas Smith emphasizes depictions of the ÈmigrÈs rather than descriptions of the landscape. Although Wordsworth recounts the innocence that he often saw in the lives of peasants as well as the sorrow of the mountain dwellers that he met, he does not assimilate the experiences of the peasants. He remains an observer of and not a participant in their lives. He int erposes, for example, an exposition on the mind between accounts of the Grison Gypsy. After introducing this solitary figure in the poem, he writes of "[the] mind condemn'd, without reprieve, to go / O'er life's long deserts with its charge of woe" (192- 93), and he then describes how the Gypsy "solitary through the desert drear / Spontaneous wanders, hand in hand with Fear" (199-200). Wordsworth empathizes with the Gypsy on the most elemental level--that of a sense of solitary wandering. However, Words worth wanders in his mind, in the imaginative as well as the natural landscapes, while the Gypsy, as well as other humans, only wander geographically. This physical description of poverty's repercussions is framed by Wordsworth's musings on the more abst ract powers of the mind in which : "th' unwilling mind may more than trace / The general sorrows of the human race" (602-03). Again, it is in the imagination that Wordsworth assimilates the experiences of the Gypsy he meets in the Alps. This woman and other peasants that Wordsworth encounters are not exiled as are the French ÈmigrÈs in Smith's poem; instead, they are embowered by the Alps and the landscape, and are marginally effaced from the politicized urban areas. The ÈmigrÈs, by contrast, are expo sed on England's southern coast; nature is not a hiding place there. Wordsworth's abstention from empathetic interaction with the solitary figures bespeaks his affinity for participation in natural and imaginative landscapes. The genesis of the spots of time, as found in Descriptive Sketches, reveals Wordsworth's early preference for the abstract and his transcendent posture in relation to the experience of the common man.

Wordsworth's landscape in Descriptive Sketches gestures toward abstract anthropomorphizing of certain ideas; these abstractions become solitary figures, and they emancipate the imagination to its own pictorialism. He writes of hills "embrown'd by Terror 's breath" (245), of the "Bare steeps, where Desolation stalks" (251), and of "crosses rear'd to Death on every side, / Which with cold kiss Devotion planted near" (256-57). These figures are inhabitants of the sublime peak, yet it is the imagination's e ye which must envision the appearance of each persona. Another telling example of this abstracted landscape in Descriptive Sketches describes a battle scene in Swiss history against Austria:

	And as on glorious ground he draws his breath, 
	Where Freedom oft, with Victory and Death, 
	Hath seen in grim array amid their Storms 
	Mixed with auxiliar Rocks, three hundred Forms; 
	While twice ten thousand corselets at the view 
	Dropp'd loud at once, Oppression shriek'd, and flew
	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
	For images of other worlds are there,
	Awful the light, and holy is the air.
	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
	To viewless realms his Spirit towers amain, 
	Beyond the senses and their little reign. (536-41, 544-45, 548-49)

Politically-oriented images of freedom, victory, and oppression reveal Wordsworth's preoccupation at this time with the political failures in France as well as his interest with a mystically religious pictorialism. The senses are belittled and have "litt le reign" in this spot where freedom overcame oppression; political liberation mirrors the metaphoric liberation of the imagination, which is free to see "other worlds" (544) and "viewless realms" (548) inaccessible to the human eye. Bishop Hunt points out that Wordsworth uses "viewless" not less than five times in Descriptive Sketches (88), a technical detail which highlights his focus on the unseen, on those objects only discernible to the imagination's eye. The amalgamation of these abstract figures in the following passage crescendos to a climax ending in death, which is an actual fall out of the symbolic realm into the imaginative realm:

	For come Diseases on, and Penury's rage, 
	Labour, and Pain, and Grief, andjoyless Age, 
	And Conscience dogging close his bleeding way 
	Cries out, and leads her Spectres to their prey, 
	'Til Hope-deserted, long in vain his breath
	Implores the dreadful untried sleep of Death. (638-43)

For Smith, death is seen as the ultimate source of peace: "for in the Grave / Is Peace" (Emigrants II.372-73). In the above passage, Wordsworth also figures "Death" as a means of escape from earthly suffering. However, Wordsworth orients his cataloging of adverse agents with respect to the Alpine dwellers and not to his personal life as does Smith. He is employing his imagination to project his own perception of the sufferings of the lowly, while Smith proclaims, through her verses, that she can readil y identify with the ÈmigrÈs' desire for rest from tumultuous living. It should be remembered that Wordsworth balances his intention to faithfully represent his experience on the walking tour with the inevitable influence of his more recent experiences in France. Smith does not completely exclude similar personifications of ideas in The Emigrants, but hers, unlike Wordsworth's pictorialisms, are comprised more often of human figures, while Wordsworth is more concerned with detailing the natural and abstr act landscapes. Again, these opposing frames of reference reveal the way in which Wordsworth's initial preoccupation with the landscape of the mind presents a more abstract, individualistic approach to responding to the French Revolution than Smith's mor e concrete, interactive approach through a human landscape.

Smith and Wordsworth both conclude their poems with panegyrics on liberty and freedom. Smith begs the "Power Omnipotent" to cause "equal Justice, drive / From the ensanguin'd earth the hell-born fiends / Of Pride, Oppression, Avarice, and Revenge" (Emigrants II.421, 432-34). Wordsworth asks, "Oh, give, great God, to Freedom's waves to ride / Sublime o'er Conquest, Avarice, and Pride . . . / And [to destroy where] dark Oppression builds her thick-ribb'd tow'rs" (Descriptive Sketches 792-95). However, Smith ends her poems with a triumphant call from the reinstatement of "Reason, Liberty, and Peace!" (II.444), while Wordsworth ends his with speculation of continuing his "various journey sad and slow" (Descriptive Sketches 813). These differences are sug gestive of the kinds of journeys that each poet has experienced in these poems. Smith begins in a state of isolated, melancholic experience and opens Book II by recalling how she "with step, / Mournful and slow, along the wave-worn cliff, / Pensive . . . took her solitary way" (II.3-5). These lines are reminiscent of the final lines of Milton's Paradise Lost when Adam and Eve "hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way" (PL XII.648-49). The same allusion is not t o be missed at the end of Descriptive Sketches as J. F. Turner notes in "'Various Journey, Sad and Slow': Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1791-92) and the Lure of Pastoral" (40). Smith, though beginning in pessimism, ends her poem with the expectant hope of reform. Wordsworth, however, who began Descriptive Sketches with pious optimism, closes the poem without the confidence that the previous innocence will be restored. Smith, it seems, ultimately reaches a state of renewed experience, achieved thro ugh her interaction with and reflections upon the solitary wanderers. Wordsworth, though, seems to be commencing a solitary journey into the fallen world of a failing Revolution, a journey which is embodied not only in his physical travels, but also in h is imagination's wanderings into those viewless realms.

For writers of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution was the impetus for poetry and prose that examined the individual's experience in a society being dismantled by the abuses of political power. Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth were two s uch writers who responded to the Revolution through poetic depictions of the human, natural, and imaginative landscape. Smith wrote The Emigrants during a time in which there was a great influx of ÈmigrÈs coming to England from France in a radical phase of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, at a similar time, was writing Descriptive Sketches while in France, and his work was influenced twofold--by his actual experiences while on the walking tour in 1790 as well as by his subsequent experiences in France . For Smith, it is through this human, politicized landscape that she is able to move from an initial state of despairing experience to one of experience that contains renewed hope for the future. Wordsworth, however, situates his focus on the natural l andscape of the Alps in Descriptive Sketches and on the landscape of the mind. He begins in an enthusiastic state of innocence, but his journey ends in uncertainty and sadness (negative experience). His solitary journey fails to inspire hope for future reform. These different approaches to understanding and representing the failures of the French Revolution bespeak the troublesome way in which an ultimate achievement of peace was vexed for these poets at a time when both the mind and body of man were e nslaved to tyranny and oppression. However, Smith's interrogation of the Romantic privileging of the solitary reveals what Curran describes as "an investment in the quotidian tones and details and a portrayal of alienated sensibility" (202) that leads Sm ith to a hope via community reform: interaction seems to be the remedy for "tranquil seclusion . . . vainly sought" (I.65).

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Bibliography

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Smith, Charlotte. The Emigrants. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. Women Writers in English 1350-1850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 131-63.

Wordsworth, William. Descriptive Sketches (1793). Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940. 44-90.

---. William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.

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---. "The I Altered." Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. 185-207.

Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Hilbish, Florence Anna May. Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749-1806). Diss. U of Pennsylvania, 1941.

Hunt, Bishop C., Jr. "Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith." Wordsworth Circle 1 (1970): 85-103.

McKillop, Alan Dugald. "Charlotte Smith's Letters." HLQ 15 (1951-52): 237- 55.

Todd, F. M. Politics and the Poet: A Study of Wordsworth. London: Methuen, 1957.

Turner, J. F. "'Various Journey, Sad and Slow': Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1791-2) and the Lure of Pastoral." Durham University Journal 69 (1976): 38-51.

Williams, John. Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.