Explore "Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A glorious people vibrated again / The lightning of the nations; Liberty / From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er France, / Scattering contagious fire into the sky, / Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay; / And in the rapid plumes of song / Clothed itself sublime and strong.
Sublime and strong? Alas! not so. An outcast, heartless, faithless, and embittered, I went forth from my prison. -- But yet Louis Philippe had fallen! And as I whirled back to Babylon and want, discontent and discord, my heart was light, my breath came thick and fierce. -- The incubus of France had fallen! and from land to land, like the Beacon-fire which leaped from peak to peak proclaiming Troy's downfall, passed on the glare of burning idols, the crash of falling anarchies. Was I mad, sinful? Both -- and yet neither. Was I mad and sinful, if on my return to my old haunts, amid the grasp of loving hands and the caresses of those who called me in their honest flattery a martyr and a hero -- what things, as Carlyle says, men will fall down and worship in their extreme need! -- was I mad and sinful, if daring hopes arose, and desperate words were spoken, and wild eyes read in wild eyes the thoughts they dare not utter? "Liberty has risen from the dead, and we too will be free!"