some of us be often loud against it; that Revolution to which at a
time when even such spirits as Coleridge and Wordsworth lost heart
in England, noble messages of love blown across seas came from your
young Republic.

It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has
shown us that neither in politics nor in nature are there
revolutions ever but evolutions only, and that the prelude to that
wild storm which swept over France in 1789 and made every king in
Europe tremble for his throne, was first sounded in literature
years before the Bastille fell and the Palace was taken. The way
for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by that critical
spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring all
things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the
discontent of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that
followed the life of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent
lake and mountain, had called humanity back to the golden age that
still lies before us and preached a return to nature, in passionate
eloquence whose music still lingers about our keen northern air.
And Goethe and Scott had brought romance back again from the prison
she had lain in for so many centuries - and what is romance but
humanity?

Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and
terror of that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the
artistic Renaissance bent to her own service when the time came - a
scientific tendency first, which has borne in our own day a brood
of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in the sphere of poetry has not been
unproductive of good. I do not mean merely in its adding to
enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that