The Poet's Poet and Other Essays (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1901. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... William the Great of England The Puritan revolution had come and gone. If its appearance had been sudden and mysterious, its disappearnce was no less so. It had come unheralded like a new knight into the tournament. It had dashed into the tourney with the swiftness of the wind, but had vanished like Lancelot when he fled into the silence of an unknown place to heal him or to die. The rapidity of either transition is the historical wonder of the seventeenth century. When we attempt the enumeration of the foes with which liberty must always battle, the surprise is, not that she does so little or so tardily, but that she achieves at all. Her foes are legion. The lust of power leaps like a rider into the saddle whenever the slightest opportunity offers. But when liberty has come, formed and fortified her camp, raised her standard, numbered her adherents, formulated her policy, written her constitution in blood, then the enigma is how, in the brief passing of a lustrum or a decade, the very vestiges of her achievements seemed washed away. That the tide, with the whole ocean swelling in its wake, can erase the rude scrawl of the child's name from the sand, is no surprise; but that when the name of liberty has been graven on the rocks with graver's tool, keen enough to carve its way through troops marshaled by kings--that such should be washed out by the impulse of the passing storm is a mystery the mind can never penetrate. Liberty came. The halo of a youth eternal binds her brow; the strength of centuries of slumbering powers seems gathered in her arm. Armies which have slumbered during a decade of centuries, awake, stirred by the resurrection power of freedom's voice. We thought to see a growing glory. We inferred a perpetual regnancy of such benignant princip...