SOURCE: "The Lake School's Conception of Liberty," in Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature: Naturalism in England, Vol. IV, translated by Mary Morison, William Heinemann, 1905, pp. 85-89.

In the following essay, originally published in 1875, Brandes compares the views of liberty held by the Lake Poets with those of the later Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.

Coleridge and the other members of the Lake School would never have dreamt of calling themselves anything but warm friends of liberty; the days were past when the reactionaries called themselves by another name. Coleridge wrote one of his most beautiful poems, the Ode to France, in the form of a hymn to liberty, to his constant love for which he calls clouds, waves, and forests to testify; and Wordsworth, who dedicated two long series of his poems to liberty, regarded himself as her acknowledged champion. A cursory glance at the...