it exists. He was quite conscious--none but those without imagination
can fail to be conscious--of the glamour of long descent and great
affairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians," the materialized or stupid
holders of power and place, and their "fortified posts"--i.e., the
country houses--just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles;
when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto,
"Choose Equality"; and he and Clough--the Republican--were not really
far apart. He mocked even at Clough, indeed, addressing his letters to
him, "Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford"; but in the midst of the
revolutionary hubbub of 1848 he pours himself out to Clough only--he and
"Thyrsis," to use his own expression in a letter, "agreeing like two
lambs in a world of wolves," and in his early sonnet (1848) "To a
Republican Friend" (who was certainly Clough) he says:

If sadness at the long heart-wasting show
Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted;
If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow

The armies of the homeless and unfed--
If these are yours, if this is what you are,
Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share.

Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no belief in sudden
radical change, nor in any earthly millennium--

Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream,
Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high
Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we dream.