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Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!
That was an appeal to Young England, the England that was too young to remember the Napoleonic wars and was thirsting for an experience of its own.
We may see in such an outburst of the militant spirit only the recrudescence of savagery. It is better to treat it seriously, for it is something which each generation must reckon with. Tennyson sums up the matter from the standpoint of ardent youth:—
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,