St. Tammany farmer. [volume] (Covington, La.) 1874-current, 1902-03-22
Our Political
Legacy
BY
| PROF. EDWARD DOWDEN, MA. LID.
Dean Of st. Patrick's College, Dublin.
Dean Of st. Patrick's College, Dublin.

visible and tangible-these were a unskaped poetry bequeathed to
chosen inhertors of the generation which was young a hundred years
ago. WHAT THEY RECEIVED AS A MIST WAS TRANS
FORME INTO A STREAM, N THE STREAM BROAD
ENED TO A SWIFT AND RIVER.
The term Romantic Revival" is somewhat misleading, 0 It
best indicates only a part of the fact. There had been IN the
eighteenth century a naturaistic movement, of which Fielding IN
prose, at an earlier date, and Crabbe in verse, at a later date, may
stand as representatives. Wordsworth was also a naturalist; ne
studied the appearance of the external world and the lives OF MS
fellows in the spirit of veracious research; but the naturalist was a
the same time an idcalist; he recognized what is spiritual IS a part
and the most vital part, of the fact. For him the invisible flowed
in through the visible; hence, austere as he may sometimes SEEM
he is the least ascehc of poets; and he it was who interpreted most
profoundly the revolutionary principle of equality, for the gross ex-
ternal distinctions of high and low, of great and small, disappear
when what is humble or what is diminutive becomes an inlet tor
spiritual light. What he attained, not without effort, he held in calm
and indefeasible possession. His poetry is in the truest sense a
is one Of serenity, enclosing heart of JOY, which has all the quicken
ing power of passion without its trouble or its vicissitude.
The romantic revival might have lost itself in extravaganza, OF
languished in the debility of a hectic disease, had it not entered into
alliance with the historical spirit, and gained vgor and sanity from
that alliance. In "Childe Harold" the awakened interest in the lite
of the past is an inspiring influence; in Frederick, the Last OF the
Goths," a chapter of Spanish history is lifted from prose to narrative
verse of grave dignity; but it was Scott, above all others, who effected
the union of the romantic and the historical imagination. His re-
suschahon of the past was wholly free from doctrlnaire theory, from
the parid mist of sentiment, from curosties to aesthetics, from
pseudo-medieval relgiosity; HIS SYMPATHY WAS WITH AC-
TON, AND THE PASSIONS WHICH ENGENDER ACTION;
he lived strenuously in the present, and therefore the past tor him
was a reality and not a dream.
The eighteenth century had not only turned with reverted gaze
in its great historical school, of which Gibbon was the master, and
in its Ossianc, Scandinavian and ballad revivals to the forgotten
ages and primitive civilizations; it leaned forward also and gazed
viii widowed hopes into the future. But the bright dawn of the
French Revolution had been followed by the Terror, and at last lib
erty and equality were realized in the form of a military despotism,
and fraternity in that of the deadly strife Of nations.
The boundless desires, the vast aspirations excited by the Revo-
lutionary movement lived in the spirit of Byron; but he saw around
him a world of ruins, ruined faiths, ruined hopes, and, in England,
the gathering forces of reaction. Byron sang generously OF free
dom; but for him freedom meant little more than the casting away
of restraint by nations and by the individual; he thought hardly at
all of the freedom in obedience to a higher law. A vast energy, a
commanding egoisn were deployed amid fallen ideals and dscred-
tied creeds; and the end was a cynhism redeemed from baseness by
the bitterness of its gayety, a cyncism for which the time was partly
responsible, and partly the man. When Byron died the sense that a
great power was lost to the world came upon his contemporaries all
the more impressively because the power was conferred in a single
mind, a single will, and did not live on as an inspiring influence OF
impersonal wisdom and of love.