The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue." Gray, in _The Progress of Poesy_, draws the same conclusion as Shelley: Her track, where'er the goddess roves, Glory pursue, and generous shame, The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame. Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, assert no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom. [Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, _Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_; Shelley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, _Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, _To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, _The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Shore_, _For You_, _O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of Liberty and Charity_; Henry van Dyke, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming, Where's the poet? Show him, show him, Muses mine, that I may know him! 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king Or poorest of the beggar clan. [Footnote: _The Poet_.]