Leaving them to their peace, let us approach a great name among our English singers of liberty.  Swinburne stands in the foremost rank.  In a collection of “English Songs of Italian Freedom,” edited by Mr. George Trevelyan, who himself has so finely narrated the epic of Italy’s redemption—­in that collection Swinburne occupies a place among the very highest.  No one has paid nobler tribute to the heroes of that amazing revolution.  No one has told the sorrow of their failures with more sympathetic rage, or has poured so burning a scorn and so deep an obloquy upon their oppressors, whether in treacherous Church or alien State.  It is magnificent, but alas! it was not war.  By the time he wrote, the war was over, the victory won.  By that time, not only the British crowd, but even people of rank, office, and culture could hardly fail to applaud.  The thing had become definite and conspicuous.  It was finished.  It stood in quite visible splendour at a safe and comfortable distance.  Ridicule had fallen impotent.  Hesitation could now put down its foot.  Superiority could smile, not in doubt, but in welcome.  The element of fear was dissipated.  The coward could shout, “I was your friend all along!” If a man wrote odes at all, he could write them to freedom then.

  “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
      Remembering Thee,
  That for ages of agony hast endured and slept,
      And would’st not see.”

How superb!  But when that was written the weeping and agony were over, the sleeper had awakened, the eyes saw.  It was easy then to sing the heroism of rebellious sorrow.  But afterwards, while an issue was still doubtful, while the cry of freedom was rising amid the obscurity, the dust, and uncertainty of actual combat, with how blind a scorn did that great poet of freedom pour upon Irishman and Boer a poison as virulent as he had once poured upon the priests and kings of Italy!

Let us emerge from the depression of such common blindness, and recall the memory of one whose vision never failed even in the midst of present gloom to detect the spark of freedom.  A few great names stand beside his.  Shelley, Landor, the Brownings, all gave the cause of Italy great and, in one case, the most exquisite verse, while the conflict was uncertain still.  Even the distracted and hesitating soul of Clough, amid the dilettante contemplation of the arts in Rome, was rightly stirred.  The poem that declared, “’Tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all,” displayed in him a rare decision, while, even among his hideous hexameters, we find the great satiric line—­fit motto for spectators at the bull-fights of freedom—­“So that I ’list not, hurrah for the glorious army of martyrs!” But the name of Byron rises above them all, not merely that he alone showed himself capable of deed, but that the deed gave to his words a solidity and concrete power such as deeds always give.  First of Englishmen, as Mr. Trevelyan says, Byron perceived that a living Italy was struggling beneath the outward semblance of Metternich’s “order”; and as early as 1821 he prepared to join the Carbonari of Naples in their revolt for Italian liberty: