She broke her fetters, and has dared be free; In new-born majesty she seems to rise, While sudden from the land oppression flies. So, at the solemn hour of nature’s birth, When brooding darkness veiled the beauteous earth, Heaven’s awful mandate pierced the solid night – “Let there be light”, it said, “and there was light!” (Lines 125-136) This leadership is described using natural imagery, as Albion is a “leading star”. Oppression leaves “the land” of a just nation when more enlightened views reach “the beauteous earth” and bring it to “light “where before only “solid night” was. Thus, Williams once again reflects on the connection between good political principles and environmental flourishing, exploring once again a point of contact between culture and nature. The positive friendship between nations here has beneficial consequences for their natural landscape, ensuring dawn reaches both lands. Williams personifies freedom and uses it to dramatise interaction with nations, and as she does so she illustrates her ideology of universal rights. Freedom in this episode is portrayed as an independent character who seeks friendships based on qualities and ideals: Freedom, who oft on Albion’s fost’ring breast Has found her friends in stars and ermine dressed, Allows that some among her chosen race Should there the claim to partial honours trace. (Lines 103 – 106) Williams portrays the fluidity with which Freedom will move from one nation to another, and the interchangeable characteristics of national identities. We learn of France’s past, “On Gallia’s coast, where oft the robe of state / Was trailed by those whom freedom’s soul must hate” (lines 111-112) and yet, in its enlightened present, “There Freedom now, with gladdened eye, beholds / The simple vest that flows in equal folds” (lines 115-116). In this figurative
America. The personified spirit, or genius, of civilisation, abandons Britannia in Barbauld’s vision: There walks a Spirit o’er the peopled earth, Secret his progress is, unknown his birth. Moody and viewless as the changing wind, No force arrests his foot, no chains can bind (Lines 215 – 218) The genius of civilization in the poem is decidedly male, and a masculine pronoun is frequently employed to distinguish this personification character from the feminine “Fancy” (line 113) who preceded him. This is emphasised throughout the poem, as we repeatedly see the masculine pronoun: “Secret his progress is, unknown his birth” (line 216); “No force arrests his foot” (line 218), “Where’er he turns” (line 219); “He thinks, he reasons”, (line 221, emphases mine). The freedom of movement that the figure represents is understood to be a masculine prerogative in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. The dynamic in the genius section is undoubtedly following the reductive traditional format that insists feminised nature and the feminised nation is subject to masculine manipulation. It is revealing that Barbauld writes of the relationship between the genius of Britain as one in which “Obedient Nature follows where he leads” (line 223). The surrounding lines explain how the genius has separated himself from a state of brutishness and has acquired a level of civilisation which apparently bestows superiority upon the genius figure: Where’er he turns, the human brute awakes, And, roused to better life, his sordid hut forsakes: He thinks, he reasons, glows with purer fires, Feels finer wants, and burns with new desires: Obedient Nature follows where he leads; The streaming marsh is changed to fruitful meads;