That crush out souls, through crunching blood and brain.
By men, who only when they died awoke!
Base nobles who o'er France vain darkness spread,
And, goading her faint steeds with stroke on stroke,
Loaded the wain—until the axles broke!
Then saved not thrones from outraged Heav'n's control,
When hunger urg'd up to the cannon's jaws
A sea of men, with only one wild soul!
Hark!—still I hear the echo of its roll!
We can scarcely listen to it without feeling that the main ideas of the Revolution, so long silent in England, were again arising into life. What would England make of them? What would they become in the New Poetry they prophesied and stimulated? The answer poetry gave was no obscure one, The ideas changed their manner; they changed the form of their demands; they were modified by circumstances; but they lived on. They became, not a furious menace from without, but a spirit moving slowly from within, working in quiet ways, infiltrating themselves into almost every sphere of human thought, and moving with dignity, and yet with passion, through the poets from this time till about 1870, when again they began to change their form.
Keble was another precursor of the awakening. That awakening was destined in poetry to be greatly interested in ideas of religion, and one species of these ideas arose in 1827 with the publication of The
