"Hurrah! Religion is a Jesuit,
The rights of man are Jacobins;
The world is free; the raven is white;
Long live the Pope--and that other;
I am going to Germany, and there I'll learn
Sonnets to sing and incense to burn.
"Welcome, thou New Year, with murder and gloom,
Stupidity, lies, and fraud!
I hope thou'lt make an end of our earth,
A bullet at least she's worth;
She's restless, poor thing, like many another,
A shot through the head--she'll cause no more bother!"
It was the fashion in those days to revile the Revolution, because it
had produced the man on horseback who had turned the old order of things
topsy-turvy in a very unceremonious fashion. Coleridge, Southey, and
Wordsworth in England, and Klopstock, Schiller, and a horde of lesser
lights in Germany, had hailed the French uprising as the bloody dawn of
a new and more glorious day; but the excesses of the Reign of Terror
frightened them back into the old fastnesses of Conservatism. Tegner
(and to his honor be it said) was one of the few who did not despair of
liberty because a people born and bred in despotism failed to exercise
the wisdom and self-restraint which only liberty can foster.
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