"Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind!
Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace!
From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war--
Austria, and that foul Woman of the North,
The lustful murderess of her wedded lord,
And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs,
So bards of elder time had haply feigned)
Some Fury fondled in her hate to man,
Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold
Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe
Horrible sympathy!"

This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is
heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them
and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page
ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to
prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the
prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val
age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society.
It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had
succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the
_Ode to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796,
with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings"
upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom;
and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which
make the _Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing of
all Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poems
shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The
fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally