m by composing a
variation, as it were, on a Byronic theme. How deeply he hated the
mediaeval obscurantism which then, under the auspices of Metternich and
his unholy "Holy Alliance" was spreading over Europe, he showed in
numerous private and public utterances concerning the political
condition of Europe after the fall of Napoleon. His greeting to the "New
Year, 1816" (which his son-in-law has foolishly excluded from his
edition of the collected works), is overbrimming with bitterness at the
triumph of the enemies of the light.

"Hurrah! Religion is a Jesuit,
The rights of man are Jacobins;
The world is free; the raven is white;
Long live the Pope--and that other;
I am going to Germany, and there I'll learn
Sonnets to sing and incense to burn.

"Welcome, thou New Year, with murder and gloom,
Stupidity, lies, and fraud!
I hope thou'lt make an end of our earth,
A bullet at least she's worth;
She's restless, poor thing, like many another,
A shot through the head--she'll cause no more bother!"

It was the fashion in those days to revile the Revolution, because it
had produced the man on horseback who had turned the old order of things
topsy-turvy in a very unceremonious fashion. Coleridge, Southey, and
Wordsworth in England, and Klopstock, Schiller, and a horde of lesser
lights in Germany, had hailed the French uprising as the bloody dawn of
a new and more glorious day; but the excesses of the Reign of Terror
frightened them back into the old fastnesses of Conservatism. Tegner
(and to his honor be it said) was one of the few who did not despair of
liberty because a people born and bred in despotism failed to exercise
the wisdom and self-restraint which only liberty can foster. For the
only road to the attainment of liberty is its practice and its abuse,
and the slow education which can be acquired by no theoretical teaching,
but only in the hard and expensive school of experience. For the
terrible birth-pangs of liberty no despotically governed people can
escape, unless it chooses to remain in thraldom.

This is the spirit that breathes through Tegner's speeches and poems,
during his most vigorous manhood; and even, when the rift in his lute
made its music harsh and uncertain, the strain was yet essentially the
same, though transposed into an alien key. It is very tempting to quote
the many noble sayings of this master of the commanding phrase, but one
or two must suf