45 46 47 When, looking on the present face of things. To the Men of Kent. October 1803 What if our numbers barely could defy Lines on the expected Invasion. 1803 Go back to antique ages, if thine eyes Composed while the Author was engaged in Writing a Tract, occasioned by the Convention of Cintra On the Final Submission of the Tyrolese Hail, Zaragoza! If with unwet eye Say, what is Honour ?—'Tis the finest sense The martial courage of a day is vain Brave Schill! by death delivered, take thy flight Call not the royal Swede unfortunate Look now on that Adventurer who hath paid Is there a Power that can sustain and cheer. Now that all hearts are glad, all faces bright Ode 1814.-When the soft hand of sleep had closed the latch Feelings of a French Royalist on the Disinterment of the Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo 93 INTRODUCTION THESE poems of Wordsworth, collected by himself under their title-Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty-are now published in a separate form as a remonstrance, and an encouragement to the English people-a remonstrance to those whose policy it is to check the national independence and liberty of the Cretans; and an encouragement to those who, following the long traditions of the English people, have looked on that policy with dismay, and have endured it, for a time, with patient but indignant difficulty. The poems extend over a period of nearly fourteen years, from the Life-Consulship of Buonaparte to the Thanksgiving Day for the overthrow of Napoleon. They are of varying excellence; those of the First Part are far the best, and the earliest sonnets of the Second Part are much better than the later. Indeed, after 1810, the poetry fails more and more, till we are at last landed, in 1816, in the desert and waterless islands of the Thanksgiving Ode, where mechanical sensationalism labours to seem imagination. To contrast this unhappy poem with such splendid living things as the Sonnets to Venice, to Switzerland, and to Toussaint, is to see Overthrow face to face. How art thou fallen, Lucifer, son of the morning! When Wordsworth began these poems the spirit of universal freedom was still with him. He desired it for all the earth. Wherever there was oppression, he hated it; wherever men rose against it, he took their side with passion, even against his own country. As time went on, his love of freedom was concentrated in his desire to see Napoleon, the great foe of liberty, destroyed; and it became only sympathy with the battle of England against the common oppressor of Europe. The desire for universal freedom was lost in the particular desire for the victory of his own country over her enemy. A few years passed by, and this change from universal to particular feeling so influenced him that the existing institutions of England and their exact preservation seemed to him to be the only guard and citadel of liberty. He gave all his political energies to their support. What England supported was right; and if she supported what she called the cause of order in the European nations, even where that order was oppressive of the people, she was still right. The struggles of the people earned his active sympathy no more. And it finally came to pass that he bore with scarcely a word of reproach or blame the cynical partition of Europe by |