and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and
not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous
spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he
lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_,
that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may
gradually develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly
situated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country.

"But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle,"

once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but
now--

"Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy,
To me a son, a brother, and a friend,
A husband and a father! who revere
All bonds of natural love, and find them all
Within the limits of thy rocky shores."

After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of
Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the
insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge,
and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so,
to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the
spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is
something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet
hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact.

_France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears in
Solitude_ as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe