ons, and are really beyond
argument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on
open questions. For although it was a great part of his intellectual
ambition to subject political questions to the action of the
fundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardent
partisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics
proper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century,
where there is still room for much difference of opinion. Yet The
Destiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished,
presents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, cast
into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in
effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part
of, the thought. France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to
Liberty--

Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause,
Whose pathless march no mortal may control!
Ye Ocean-waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll,
Yield homage only to eternal laws!
Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save when your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind!
Where like a man beloved of God,
Through glooms which never woodman trod,
How oft, pursuing fancies holy,

[94]

My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,
Inspired, beyond the guess of folly,
By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound!
O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high!
And O ye Clouds that far above me soar'd!

Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
Yea, everything that is and will be free!
Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest liberty.

And the whole ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to
that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in
indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French
Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines,
really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect
which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France,
is only to be found in nature:--

Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!

In his changes of political sentiment, Coleridge was associated with
the "Lake School"; and there is yet one other ve