--So be it!--All honour to him Who snatch'd the world, in his day, From an overmastering King, A colossal imperial sway! Calm adamantine endurant chief, Fit forerunner of him, whose crowning stroke, Rousing his Guards on the Flandrian plain, Unvassall'd Europe from despot yoke! He who from Ganges to Rhine Traced o'er the world his red line Irresistible; while in the breast Reign'd devotedness utter, and self for England suppress'd! O names that enhearten the soul, Blenheim and Waterloo! In no vain worship of glory The poet turns him to you! O sung by worthier song than mine, If the day of a nation's weakness rise, Of the little counsels that dare not dare, Of a land that no more on herself relies,-- O breath of our great ones that were, Burn out this taint in the air! The old heart of England restore, Till the blood of the heroes awake, and shout in her bosom once more! --Morning is fresh on the field Where the war-sick champions lie, By the wreckage of stiffening dead, The anguish that yearns but to die. Ah note of human agony heard The paean of victory over and through! Ah voice of duty and justice stern That, at e'en this price, commands them to do! And a vision of Glory goes by, Veil'd head and remorseful eye, A triumph of Death!--And they cried 'Only less dark than defeat is the morning of conquest';--and sigh'd. Blenheim is fully described in Lord Stanhope's _Reign of Queen Anne_. Its importance as a critical battle in European history lies in the fact that the work of liberating the Great Alliance against the paramount power of France under Lewis XIV, (which England had unwisely fostered from Cromwell to James II), was secured by this victory. 'The loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the armies of Lewis as all but invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the flower of the French soldiery broke the spell': (Green: _History of the English People_: B. VIII: ch. iii). 'The French and Bavarians, who numbered, like their opponents, some fifty thousand men, lay behind a little stream which ran through swampy ground to the Danube . . . It was not till midday that Eugene, who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing the stream. The English foot at once forded it on the left.' They were repelled for the time. But, in the centre, Marlborough, 'by making an artificial road across the morass which covered it,' in two desperate charges turned the day. A map of 1705 in the _Annals of Queen Anne's Reign_, shows vast hillsides to the right of the Allies covered with wood. This map also specifies the advance of the English in nine columns.