Thought I, the impassioned strain
Which without aid of numbers I sustain
Like acceptation from the world will find.
This deliberate and lonely emotion was fitter to inspire grave
poetry than a pamphlet appealing to an immediate crisis. And the
sonnets dedicated _To Liberty_ (1802-16) are the outcome of many
moods like these.
It is little to say of these sonnets that they are the most
permanent record in our literature of the Napoleonic war. For that
distinction they have few competitors. Two magnificent songs of
Campbell's, an ode of Coleridge's, a few spirited stanzas of Byron's--
strangely enough there is little besides these that lives in the
national memory, till we come to the ode which summed up the long
contest a generation later, when its great captain passed away. But
these _Sonnets to Liberty_ are worthy of comparison with the noblest
passages of patriotic verse or prose which all our history has
inspired--the passages where Shakespeare brings his rays to focus on
"this earth, this realm, this England,"--or where the dread of
national dishonour has kindled Chatham to an iron glow,--or where
Milton rises from the polemic into the prophet, and Burke from the
partisan into the philosopher.
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