[3] Sorö Akademi is a Danish public school. (Transcriber's note.) [4] _Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel T. Coleridge_, ii 225. [5] "On the Constitution of Church and State according to the Ideal of Each": _Lay Sermons_. VIII THE LAKE SCHOOL'S CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY 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 works of these poets might well leave us with the impression that they were as true lovers of liberty as Moore, or Shelley, or Byron. But the word liberty in their mouths meant something different from what it did in Moore's, or Shelley's, or Byron's. To understand this we must dissect the word by means of two simple questions: freedom, from what?--liberty, to do what? To these conservative poets freedom is a perfectly definite thing, a right which England has and the other countries of Europe have not--the right of a country to govern itself, un-tyrannised over by an autocratic ruler of foreign extraction. The country which has this privilege is free. By liberty, then, the men in question understood freedom from foreign political tyranny; there is no thought of liberty of action in their conception at all. Look through Wordsworth's _Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_, and see what it is they celebrate. It is the struggle of the different nations against Napoleon, who is described as a species of Antichrist. (Scott calls him "the Devil on his burning throne.")