Others who will may have the honour of that privilege, to cast the weight of their hearts upon the losing side, to bring tribute of love and trust and reverence rather to failure than to success, to a republic bound in chains of iron than to an empire bound in chains of gold; but men who have the lineal pulse of French blood in their veins and the traditional memories of French kindred and alliance in their hearts, men to whose forefathers in exile for their faith's sake the mighty mother has once and again opened her arms for shelter in past ages, and fostered under her wings generation after generation as her children, cannot well read such words as these without a thrill of the blood and a kindling of the memory which neither the native of France nor the kinless foreigner can wholly share.
Side by side with the ardent denunciations of German
panting o'er a land of death—heroic land!'? This prophecy is from the new song of Whitman:
"Sure, as the ship of all, the Earth itself,
Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos,
Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons,
Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty,
Onward, beneath the sun, following its course,
So thou, O ship of France!"
In the notes to his essay on "Democratic Vistas", Whitman for one expresses his recognition of Hugo living and Byron dead as "deserving so well of America;" which may be set against the impertinences of meaner American persons. It may likewise be remarked and remembered with pleasure that among the last printed words of Landor were two little stanzas of tributary verse in honour of the younger poet's exile. Amid the countless calumnies and insults cast upon that exile by French and English writers of the reptile kind, it is a relief to recall the greeting sent to it by a great English republican from the extreme verge of life, and from the shore of the new world by the first poet of American democracy.
