“Prayer perchance may win
A term to God’s indignant mood
And the orgies of the multitude,
Which now begin....”
We cannot help thinking, if God’s name must be introduced in the matter, that he is not especially indignant with Mr. Disraeli and the English nobles and people at the extension of the suffrage, and that for this reason to stigmatize 1867 as “the year of the great Crime” is nonsense. As for “the sordid Trader,” there has always been a considerable admixture of the “Trader” in the composition of the English government, noble or ignoble. The first Napoleon’s estimate of the English as “a nation of shopkeepers” was not an ill-judged one; and never was that government, at least since Reformation times, so pure and its members so honest as to-day, when “the sordid Trader” has a large hand in the administration. We do all honor to the spirit of chivalry; we do not object to class distinctions in countries where such distinctions are historic and hereditary; but we recognize manhood wherever we find it, and set it above all accidents of time or clime or artificial restrictions. At the end of the ode, however, the poet rises above his smaller self to a strain that is noble and true:
'And now, because the dark comes on apace
When none can work for fear,
And Liberty in every Land lies slain,
And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,
And heavy prophecies, suspended long