And there is a like fluctuation of mood.

Now he is formally justifying his past, now musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have been and was not.

At the outset we see him complacently enough intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist, who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator, "one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and aspirations.

The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but deathless dream:-- "Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, Imparting exultation to the hills." [Footnote 57: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii.

385.] But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting ideas.