it to his conscience and the world by some law-term! Such men are very dangerous, unless when they are tied up in the forms of a profession, where form is opposed to form, where no-meaning baffles want of sense, and where no great harm is done, because there is not much to do: but when chicane and want of principle are let loose upon the world, "with famine, sword, and fire at their heels, leashed in like hounds," when they have their prey marked out for them by the passions, when they are backed by force—when the pen of the Editor of The Times is seconded by eleven hundred thousand bayonets—then such men are very mischievous.
"My soul, turn from them: turn we to survey" where poetry, joined hand in hand with liberty, renews the golden age in 1793, during the reign of Robespierre, which was hardly thought a blot in their escutcheon, by those who said and said truly, for what we know, that he destroyed the lives of hundreds, to save the lives of thousands: (Mark; then, as now, "Carnage was the daughter of Humanity." It is true, these men have changed sides, but not parted with their principles, that is, with their presumption and egotism)—let us turn where Pantisocracy's equal hills and vales arise in visionary pomp, where Peace and Truth have kissed each other "in Philarmonia's undivided dale;" and let us see whether the fictions and the forms of poetry give any better assurance of political consistency than the fictions and forms of law. The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty: but, we suspect, not in times like these—not in the present reign.
The spirit of poetry is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom. Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is, for that reason, very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry, like the law, is a fiction; only a more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties where they do not exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether they exist or not. It is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making, but soars above all obstacles. It cannot be "constrained by mastery." It has the
