join their cause--the insurgents in
Spain and in the little land of Tyrol. No wonder then that now
British poets sympathised with the victors at the hill of Isel,
and praised their courage and their leaders, and at last, when
they were overcome by superior forces, laid the laurel wreath of
tragic heroism on their graves.

"Thirty or forty years before, English poets would scarcely have
shown such a lively interest in a war of independence in a foreign
country. They stood under the curse of narrow-mindedness and
one-sidedness both in politics and in art, so that their
smooth-running verses neither sought nor found a response even in
the hearts of their own fellow-countrymen. The poets who appeared
before the public in the year 1798 with the famous 'Lyrical
Ballads' were the first to strike out a new path. Although
differing considerably from one another in other respects, they
agreed in their opposition to the conventionality of the old
school."

. . . . .

"Wordsworth lived in a simple little house on the romantic lake
of Grasmere, in the heart of the mountains of Westmoreland. He
studied more in his walks over heath and field than in books, and
entered with interest into the questions affecting the good of the
country people around him. All this of necessity impelled him to
take a warm interest in the herdsmen of the Alps.

"But the Tyrolese inspired him with still greater interest on
political grounds. Like all the lake poets, he was an enthusiastic
admirer, not of the French revolution, but of the republic as long
as it seemed to desire the realization of the ideas of Liberty,
Fraternity, Equality, and the rest of Rousseau's Arcadian notions;
and it was a bitter disillusion for him, as well as for Klopstock,
when this much-praised home of the free rights of man resolved
itself into the empire of Napoleon. From this moment he took his
place on the side of the enemies of France, and particularly on
the side of the Tyrolese, since they had never lost the natural
simplicity of their habits, and had regained the hereditary
freedom, of which they had been deprived, with the sword. Thus
arose the curious paradox, that a republican poet glorified
spontaneously the cause of an exceedingly monarchical and
conservative country.

"Wordsworth gave vent to his enthusiasm in six sonnets, which, as
far as power of language and vigour of thought a