It was passages such as this, perhaps, which led Canning to declare that Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest piece of political eloquence which had appeared since Burke. And yet if we compare it with Burke, or with the great Greek exemplar of all those who would give speech the cogency of act,--we see at once the causes of its practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and principles are often as lofty as any patriot can express; but their loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but to add to their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven into the facts of the hour; action seemed to turn, on them as on its only possible pivot; it was as though Virtue and Freedom hung armed in heaven above the assembly, and in the visible likeness of immortal ancestors beckoned upon an urgent way. Wordsworth's mood of mind, on the other hand, as he has depicted it in two sonnets written at the same time as his tract, explains why it was that that appeal was rather a solemn protest than an effective exhortation. In the first sonnet he describes the surroundings of his task,--the dark wood and rocky cave, "the hollow vale which foaming torrents fill with omnipresent murmur:"-- Here mighty Nature! In this school sublime I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain; For her consult the auguries of time, And through the human heart explore my way, And look and listen, gathering whence I may Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain. And then he proceeds to conjecture what effect his tract will produce:-- I dropped my pen, and listened to the wind, That sang of trees uptorn and vessels tost; A midnight harmony, and wholly lost To the general sense of men, by chains confined Of business, care, or pleasure,--or resigned To timely sleep. Thought I, the impassioned strain Which without aid of numbers I sustain Like acceptation from the world will find. This deliberate and lonely emotion was fitter to inspire grave poetry than a pamphlet appealing to an immediate crisis. And the sonnets dedicated _To Liberty_ (1802-16) are the outcome of many moods like these.