therefore, the second part of _Christabel_ (1800), may almost be
described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem
as

"The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
Hanging so light and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."

The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his
revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_,
as it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the
record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in
Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had
come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more
passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had
plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of
Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her
fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his
own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_
he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not
to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation;
that--

"The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They burst their manacles, and wear the name
Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";

and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory
conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds