Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/33

BOOK I.] Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate

How vanquished Mithridates northward passed,

And, hidden in the cloud of years, became

Odin, the Father of a race by whom

Perished the Roman Empire: how the friends

And followers of Sertorius, out of Spain

Flying, found shelter in the Fortunate Isles,

And left their usages, their arts and laws,

To disappear by a slow gradual death,

To dwindle and to perish one by one,

Starved in those narrow bounds: but not the soul

Of Liberty, which fifteen hundred years

Survived, and, when the European came

With skill and power that might not be withstood,

Did, like a pestilence, maintain its hold

And wasted down by glorious death that race

Of natural heroes: or I would record

How, in tyrannic times, some high-souled man,

Unnamed among the chronicles of kings,

Suffered in silence for Truth's sake: or tell,

How that one Frenchman,(1) through continued force

Of meditation on the inhuman deeds

Of those who conquered first the Indian Isles,

Went single in his ministry across

The Ocean; not to comfort the oppressed,