"Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No! True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, But not for you will Freedom's altars flame. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When riseth Lacedemon's hardihood, When Thebes Epaminondas rears again, When Athens' children are with hearts endued, When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men, Then may'st thou be restored; but not till then." But his love of liberty at that time was of a purely political nature; it was the free-born Englishman's indignation at seeing other nations unable to shake off a foreign yoke to which his own nation would never have dreamt of submitting. Now he has learned what liberty in the wide, full, universal meaning of the word is. Now he feels that free _thought_ is the first essential requisite of all spiritual life. "Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base Abandonment of reason to resign Our right of thought--our last and only place Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine: Though from our birth the faculty divine Is chain'd and tortured--cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine Too brightly on the unprepared mind, The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind." And it is his intention not merely to ponder, but to act. Invoking Time, the great avenger, whom he reminds that he has borne the hatred of the world with calm pride--and he has experienced all its varieties of hatred, "From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the loud roar of foaming calumny To the small whisper of the as paltry few, And subtler venom of the reptile crew"-- he concludes with the prayer: "Let me not have worn this iron in my soul in vain!" Now, his personal woes shrink into nothing when he beholds the gigantic ruins of Rome; and, like the Sulpicius with whose feelings Chateaubriand endowed the hero of _Les Martyrs_, he feels the insignificance of his fate compared with that which has swept away the cities of Greece. He writes:-- "Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him, The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind, The friend of Tully."