The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes.Wordsworth, William
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The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes.
Wordsworth, William
English literature -- 19th century
The materials of a
new balance of power exist in the language, and name, and territory of
Spain, in those of France, and those of Italy, Germany, Russia, and the
British Isles. The smaller States must disappear, and merge in the large
nations and wide-spread languages. The possibility of this remodelling
of Europe I see clearly; earnestly do I pray for it; and I have in my
mind a strong conviction that your invaluable work will be a powerful
instrument in preparing the way for that happy issue. Yet, still, we
must go deeper than the nature of your labour requires you to penetrate.
Military policy merely will not perform all that is needful, nor mere
military virtues. If the Roman State was saved from overthrow, by the
attack of the slaves and of the gladiators, through the excellence of
its armies, yet this was not without great difficulty;[22] and Rome
would have been destroyed by Carthage, had she not been preserved by a
civic fortitude in which she surpassed all the nations of the earth. The
reception which the Senate gave to Terentius Varro, after the battle of
Cannae, is the sublimest event in human history. What a contrast to the
wretched conduct of the Austrian government after the battle at Wagram!
England requires, as you have shown so eloquently and ably, a new system
of martial policy; but England, as well as the rest of Europe, requires
what is more difficult to give it,--a new course of education, a higher
tone of moral feeling, more of the grandeur of the imaginative
faculties, and less of the petty processes of the unfeeling and purblind
understanding, that would manage the concerns of nations in the same
calculating spirit with which it would set about building a house. Now a
State ought to be governed (at least in these times), the labours of the
statesman ought to advance, upon calculations and from impulses similar
to those which give motion to the hand of a great artist when he is
preparing a picture, or of a mighty poet when he is determining the
proportions and march of a poem;--much is to be done by rule; the great
outline is previously to be conceived in distinctness, but the
consummation of the work must be trusted to resources that are not
tangible, though known to exist. Much as I admire the political sagacity
displayed in your work, I respect you still more for the lofty spirit
that supports it; for the animation and courage with which it is
replete; for the contempt, in a just cause, of death and danger by which
it is ennobled; for its heroic confidence in the valour of your
countrymen; and the absolute determination which it everywhere expresses
to maintain in all points the honour of the soldier's profession, and
that of the noble Nation of which you are a member--of the Land in which
you were born. No insults, no indignities, no vile stooping, will your
politics admit of; and therefore, more than for any other cause, do I
congratulate my country on the appearance of a book which, resting in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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