Such as Columbia saw arise when she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled?
Or must such minds be nourished in the wild,
Deep in the unpruned forest, 'midst the roar[1]
Of cataracts, where nursing Nature smiled
On infant Washington? Has Earth no more
Such seeds within her breast, or Europe no such shore?
XCVII.
But France got drunk, with blood to vomit crime;[2]
And fatal have her Saturnalia been[3]
To Freedom's cause, in every age and clime;
Because the deadly days which we have seen,
And vile Ambition, that built up between
- ↑ Deep in the lone Savannah——.—[MS. M. erased.]
- ↑ Too long hath Earth been drunk with blood and crime.—[MS. M. erased.]
- ↑
Her span of freedom hath but fatal been
To that of any coming age or clime.—[MS. M.]
the report which Coleridge prepared for the Morning Post of February 18, 1800, and it appears in the later edition in the Collection of Pitt's speeches. "It does not occur in the speech as reported by the Times." It is curious that in the jottings which Coleridge, Parliamentary reporter pro hac vice, scrawled in pencil in his note-book, the phrase appears as "the nursling and champion of Jacobinism;" and it is possible that the alternative of the more rhetorical but less forcible "child" was the poet's handiwork. It became a current phrase, and Coleridge more than once reverts to it in the articles which he contributed to the Morning Post in 1802. (See Essays on His Own Times, ii. 293, and iii. 1009-1019; and Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1895, i. 327, note.)]
