torical fact from which liberty derives all
its recommendations, and falsehood the
worst features of its deformity. There is
a reflux in the tide of human things which
bears the shipwrecked hopes of men into
a secure haven after the storms are past.
Methinks, those who now live have survived
an age of despair.

The French Revolution may be consi-
dered as one of those manifestations of
a general state of feeling among civilised
mankind produced by a defect of corre-
spondence between the knowledge existing
in society and the improvement or gradual

by which they had been deluded into
submission; the tranquillity of successful
patriotism, and the universal toleration
and benevolence of true philanthropy;
the treachery and barbarity of hired
soldiers; vice not the object of punishment
and hatred, but kindness and pity; the
faithlessness of tyrants; the confederacy
of the Rulers of the World, and the restora-
tion of the expelled Dynasty by foreign
arms; the massacre and extermination of
the patriots, and the victory of established
power; the consequences of legitimate
despotism, civil war, famine, plague,
superstition, and an utter extinction of abolition of political institutions. The
the domestic affections; the judicial | year 1788 may be assumed as the epoch
murder of the advocates of Liberty; the of one of the most important crises pro-
temporary triumph of oppression, that duced by this feeling. The sympathies
secure earnest of its final and inevitable connected with that event extended to
fall; the transient nature of ignorance and every bosom. The most generous and
error, and the eternity of genius and virtue. amiable natures were those which parti-
Such is the series of delineations of which cipated the most extensively in these sym-
the Poem consists. And, if the lofty pathies. But such a degree of unmingled
passions with which it has been my scope good was expected as it was impossible
to distinguish this story shall not excite to realise. If the Revolution had been in
in the reader a generous impulse, an ardent every respect prosperous, then misrule and
thirst for excellence, an interest profound superstition would lose half their claims to
and strong such as belongs to no meaner our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive
desires, let not the failure be imputed to a can unlock with the slightest motion of
natural unfitness for human sympathy in his fingers, and which do not eat with
these sublime and animating themes. It poisonous rust into the soul. The revul-
is the business of the Poet to communicate sion occasioned by the atrocities of the
to others the pleasure and the enthusiasm demagogues, and the re-establishment of
arising out of those images and feelings in successive tyrannies in France, was terrible,
the vivid presence of which within his own and felt in the remotest corner of the
mind consists at once his inspiration and civilised world. Could they listen to the
his reward.
plea of reason who had groaned under the
calamities of a social state according to
the provisions of which one man riots in
luxury whilst another famishes for want of
bread? Can he who the day before was
a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-
minded, forbearing, and independent?
This is the consequence of the habits of a
state of society to be produced by resolute
perseverance and indefatigable hope, and
long-suffering and long-believing courage,
and the systematic efforts of generations
of men of intellect and virtue. Such is
the lesson which experience teaches now.
But, on the first reverses of hope in the
progress of French liberty, the sanguine
eagerness for good overleaped the solution

The panic which, like an epidemic transport, seized upon all classes of men during the excesses consequent upon the French Revolution, is gradually giving place to sanity. It has ceased to be believed that whole generations of mankind ought to consign themselves to a hopeless inheritance of ignorance and misery, because a nation of men who had been dupes and slaves for centuries were incapable of conducting themselves with the wisdom and tranquillity of freemen so soon as some of their fetters were partially loosened, That their conduct could not have been marked by any other characters than ferocity and thoughtlessness is the his

of these questions, and for a time extin- in contriving to disgust him according to guished itself in the unexpectedness of their the rules of criticism, I have simply result. Thus, many of the most ardent clothed my thoughts in what appeared to and tender-hearted of the worshippers me the most obvious and appropriate of public good have been morally ruined language. A person familiar with nature, by what a partial glimpse of the events and with the most celebrated productions they deplored appeared to show as the of the human mind, can scarcely err in melancholy desolation of all their cherished following the instinct, with respect to hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy selection of language, produced by that have become the characteristics of the age familiarity. in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics, and inquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom, But mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change. In that belief I have composed the following Poem.

I do not presume to enter into competition with our greatest contemporary Poets. Yet I am unwilling to tread in the footsteps of any who have preceded me. I have sought to avoid the imitation of any style of language or versification peculiar to the original minds of which it is the character; designing that, even if what I have produced be worthless, it should still be properly my own. Nor have I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to my own ingenuity

There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities. No education, indeed, can entitle to this appellation a dull and unobservant mind, or one, though neither dull nor unobservant, in which the channels of communication between thought and expression have been obstructed or closed. How far it is my fortune to belong to either of the latter classes I cannot know. I aspire to be something better. The circumstances of my accidental education have been favourable to this ambition. I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war; cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me, like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn. I have considered Poetry in its most comprehensive sense;

1 I ought to except Sir W. Drummond's Academical Questions; a volume of very acute and powerful metaphysical criticism.

2 It is remarkable, as a symptom of the revival of public hope, that Mr. Malthus has assigned, in the later editions of his work, an indefinite dominion to moral restraint over the principle of population. This concession answers all the inferences from his doctrine unfavourable to human improvement, and reduces the Essay on Population to a commentary illustrative of the unanswerableness of Political Justice.

S

H

And this

= meanest

s of any ave not

The Poem now presented to the public occupied little more than six months in the composition. That period has been devoted to the task with unremitting ardour and enthusiasm. I have exercised a watchful and earnest criticism on my work as it grew under my hands. I would willingly have sent it forth to the world with that perfection which long labour and revision is said to bestow. But I found that, if I should gain something in exactness by this method, I might lose much of the newness and energy of imagery and language as it flowed fresh from my mind. And, although the mere composition occupied no more than six months, the thoughts thus arranged were slowly gathered in as many years.

pressive silence of those sagacious enemies who dare not trust themselves to speak. I shall endeavour to extract, from the midst of insult and contempt and maledictions, those admonitions which may tend to correct whatever imperfections such censurers may discover in this my first serious appeal to the public. If certain critics were as clear-sighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their virulent writings! As is, I fear I shall be malicious enough to be amused with their paltry tricks and lame invectives. Should the public judge that my composition is worthless, I shall indeed bow before the tribunal from which Milton | received his crown of immortality; and shall seek to gather, if I live, strength from that defeat, which may nerve me to some new enterprise of thought which may not be worthless. I cannot conceive that Lucretius, when he meditated that poem whose doctrines are yet the basis of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose eloquence has been the wonder of mankind, wrote in awe of such censure as the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when Greece was led captive, and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible | Revenge, or Envy, or Prejudice. Love is set of sophisms, in favour of that contempt | celebrated everywhere as the sole law which for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and should govern the moral world.

I trust that the reader will carefully distinguish between those opinions which have a dramatic propriety in reference to the characters which they are designed to elucidate, and such as are properly my own.

The erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself. The belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his benevolence, is widely different from my own. In recommending also a great and important change in the spirit which animates the social institutions of mankind, I have avoided all flattery to those violent and malignant passions of our nature which are ever on the watch to mingle with and to alloy the most beneficial innovations. There is no quarter given to

that faith in portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its stream.

Were these the kind of men whose disapprobation the wise and lofty-minded Lucretius should have regarded with a salutary awe? The latest and perhaps the meanest of those who follow in his footsteps would disdain to hold life on such conditions.

DEDICATION

There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is: there's not any

law

Exceeds his knowledge: neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.
CHAPMAN.

TO MARY

I

So now my summer task is ended,
Mary,

And I return to thee, mine own
heart's home;

As to his Queen some victor Knight of
Faery,

Earning bright spoils for her en-
chanted dome ;

Nor thou disdain that, ere my fame
become

Astar among the stars of mortal night, If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom,

Its doubtful promise thus I would unite

With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.

green

Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat

Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall
I be seen:

But beside thee, where still my heart
has ever been.

I do remember well the hour which burst

:

My spirit's sleep a fresh Maydawn it was,

When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,

And wept, I knew not why: until there rose

From the near schoolroom voices that, alas!

Were but one echo from a world of

III

Thoughts of great deeds were mine,
dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world
from youth did pass.

woes

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

II

The toil which stole from thee so many an hour

And just, and free, and mild, if in
me lies

Is ended-and the fruit is at thy
feet!

Such power, for I grow weary to
behold

No longer where the woods to frame
a bower

With interlaced branches mix and
meet,

The selfish and the strong still
tyrannise
Without reproach or check." I then
controlled

Or where, with sound like many My tears, my heart grew calm, and I
voices sweet,
was meek and bold.

Waterfalls leap among wild islands

IV

And then I clasped my hands, and looked around,

But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,

Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground

So, without shame, I spake :-"I will be wise,