[In the excerpt below, Levine compares Thomson's Liberty with William Collins's "Ode to Liberty."]

Liberty, James Thomson's nearly 3500-line blank verse "poetical vision" that recounts the Whiggish progress of European civilization and the triumphs of British freedom, has been almost unanimously viewed as one of his greatest aesthetic failures, a poem that Johnson once "tried to read, and soon desisted." To this day, interest in the poem remains mostly historical, perhaps unjustly. For not only did Thomson incorporate sections of this panoramic didactic poem into his later, expanded versions of The Seasons, but mid-eighteenth-century British poets also acknowledged this most extensive of progress pieces as a central work of patriotic poetry. In December 1746, twelve years after the first books of Liberty were published, William Collins offered his 144-line Pindaric "Ode to Liberty," one of the more ambitious pieces in his collection, Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects. Although it is indebted at various points to Pope, Dryden, Spenser, the lyrical (as opposed to Thomson's epic) Milton, and writers of the classical and native British Pindaric traditions, Collins's ode borrows and transforms substantial parts of Liberty as its most important recent influence, especially as a model of patriotic poetry whose progressive Whig ideology is no longer tenable. The "Ode to Liberty" redirects pivotal themes, settings, and language in Thomson, resulting in a progress poem that fully responds to new crises in international politics and redefines the poet's role as spokesman for the the English national conscience.

The progress piece assumed various forms, but, as developed by Thomson and Collins, among others, it featured an imaginary westward and northward journey of an allegorical entity such as Liberty, though both poets also incorporate an important alternative tradition of a northern Liberty that progresses southward. A typical "progress" of power or knowledge (translatio imperil or translatio studii) traces the birth and historical manifestations of its subject from classical times to the present, conveniently ending in contemporary Britain, the last and therefore best model of civilization and government. Yet, despite the connotations of cultural "advancement" that progress poems suggest (besides their primary meaning, "to travel"), mid-eighteenth-century poets are aware of at least two problems related to this scheme of world history. One is that England, like Greece, Rome, the medieval Italian city-states, and most of northern Europe, will enjoy the fruits of Liberty for only a limited time in history, before the spirit migrates further westward, even, in one of Bishop Berkeley's poems, as far away as America:

Berkeley's poem suggests one further problem of cultural progress and refinement: a certain loss of native, foundational energy, whether this is the visionary power of the first "Druid" poet-priests, or the vigorously participatory government of an idealized Gothic state (a Whig model which, J. G. A. Pocock remarks, conveniently omitted serfdom). As will be shown, Collins recognizes the limitations and even contradictions in the ways that a partisan writer like Thomson approaches these problems, and accommodates the progress piece to a different set of contemporary political crises: whereas the corruption, luxury, and self-interest exemplified by Walpole is the main enemy of Liberty for Thomson, Collins more typically places responsibility on the entire nation, which needs to be purged of such ills as the Pretender's 1745 uprising and British involvement in the unpopular, unsuccessful War of Austrian Succession.

Despite their distinct forms and different political contexts, an overlapping stock of Whig poetical commonplaces suggests a direct line of continuity, with important thematic variations, from Thomson to Collins. In one of the first modern comparisons of the two poems, Edward Ainsworth labeled Collins's "Ode to Liberty" a "concentrated and somewhat confused version" of Thomson's Liberty; in his view, the scenes that the earlier poet draws in great detail and places in an elaborate, continuous progress are obliquely and abruptly presented in the later ode. Ainsworth's discussion includes several conspicuous points of comparison: the allusions to an idealized "Druid" past that gave birth to a British temple of Liberty; the embodiment of Liberty in models of Classical sculpture and architecture; the contemplation of broken, damaged, or violated cultural artifacts as a sign that southern European nations no longer enjoy freedom; and most importantly, the recurrent cycle of Liberty rising and falling in each nation it visits through history, from Greece and Rome onwards to England. In these two poems, the intermediate stops include medieval Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Switzerland. Although these points of similarity show a strong affinity between the two poems, one may disagree with Ainsworth's particular valuations by closely comparing the function and style of these conventions in Thomson and Collins. For example, Thomson's Goddess of Liberty characteristically reflects upon the past glories of Venice:

Nor be the then triumphant State forgot;
Where, push'd from plundered Earth, a Remnant still,
Inspired by me, thro' the dark Ages kept
Of my old Roman Flame some Sparks alive:
The seeming God-built City! which my Hand
Deep in the Bosom fix'd of wond'ring Seas.
Astonish'd Mortals sail'd, with pleasing Awe,
Around the Sea-girt Walls, by Neptune fenc'd,
And down the briny Street; where, on each hand.
Amazing seen amid unstable Waves,
The splendid Palace shines; and rising Tides,
The green Steps marking, murmur at the Door.
To this fair Queen of Adria's stormy Gulph,
The Mart of Nations! long, obedient Seas
Roll'd all the Treasure of the radiant East.
But now no more.

Thomson makes Venice a "type" of Britain, which will later fulfill the destiny of commercial superiority at sea. Maintaining a commonplace of progress poetry, Thomson equates commercial success with governmental freedom, and thus explains how Venice, like Rome, has fallen because of a despotic government that has interfered with and restricted trade.

In the passage that follows, Collins renders an account of the same historical topos, the "golden age" of medieval Venice, yet his style of presenting it in his ode makes new variations upon the "progress" theme and form. Besides his emphasis on features of Venice different from those of Thomson's description, Collins's manner of introducing this scene is noticeably more compressed, oblique, and less moralistic, but by no means is it a "concentrated and somewhat confused version" of the scene from Liberty:

Strike, louder strike th' ennobling Strings
To those, whose Merchant Sons were Kings;
To Him, who deck'd with pearly Pride,
In Adria weds his green-hair'd Bride;
Hail Port of Glory, Wealth, and Pleasure,
Ne'er let me change this Lydian Measure.

Collins portrays some of the same facets of the fallen commercial paradise as Thomson: the lapsed commercial royalty of once-republican Venice, "those, whose Merchant Sons were Kings"; the grandeur and pomp in Collins's "pearly Pride" and "Port of Glory, Wealth, and Pleasure," which resemble Thomson's "splendid Palace" and the "Treasure of the radiant East"; and a similar setting of the Doge's palace near the Adriatic Sea, the "greenhair'd bride" whom the Doge symbolically weds, perhaps echoing Thomson's descriptions of his home's "green steps" and suggesting the "marriage" of advanced culture with powerful nature. Yet Collins has done more than borrow some of Thomson's diction and compress his topographical descriptions. The quoted passage does not so much describe as glance obliquely at a city that once thrived but has now vanished. The entire ode is cast as a search for the traces of fallen, fugitive Liberty, not as a full story of its rise and fall.

In his patriotic ode, Collins makes use of the same conventional themes, even some of the same imagery and diction, as Thomson to describe the course of Liberty, but not for the sake of building a triumphant narrative of its journey from Classical times to mid-eighteenth-century England. On the contrary, all the conventional materials of the progress become problematized in Collins; he reassesses every part of Liberty's journey, from recovering her fragmented past to warding off the imminent threats to her spirit. Even the material Collins selects is a departure from conventional accounts of Liberty, as he moves away from the panoramic historical scene in Thomson. Although the Miltonic diction and richly descriptive periodic sentences dignify the effect of various passages in Liberty, the quoted excerpt on Venice, to which "long, obedient Seas / Roll'd all the Treasure of the radiant East," essentially says that a small, insular city-state, surrounded by a sublimely oceanic setting, was once a magnificent commercial center. The excerpt from Collins's ode, a peculiar cross of historical legend and myth, concentrates mainly upon the ritual, the Doge's ceremonial "wedding" with the sea each year when he throws a gold ring into it. The highly particularized and indirectly introduced scene is more traditionally the material of a Pindaric ode; Collins does not draw the same exhaustive scene of a busy commercial hub that is typical of Thomson's elevated georgic, and these different manners of representation reflect a substantial change in the ways that history and poetic form can lend support to or critique the present.

For his five-book "poetical vision," Thomson introduces the topoi of a Whig progress through a dea ex machina, the goddess Liberty, who accounts for the rise and fall of her presence in a sequence of European states. Although its Miltonic diction and exhaustive depictions of classical history lend Liberty a ceremonious air, the historical narrative, which resembles the "Grand Tour" of the continent, would have been easily understandable to anyone reading the poem. The details of the historical commonplaces are dressed up in a formal way, but nonetheless had been the material of inherited accounts of civilization, especially those that supported eighteenth-century Oppositionist Whig beliefs. In contrast, Collins's more legendary history recovers shadowy supernatural lore from the mythological past to restore the place of inspired patriotic poetry in modern society. Though a Pindaric ode can be an occasion for elevated diction and obscure syntax (for example, in Cowley or Gray), Collins's predominantly end-stopped tetrameter and the rhyming couplets or balanced quatrains that make up his epodes actually are a purification of the poetic forms inherited from Thomson. Collins pares down the descriptive wording, selectively appropriates scenes from "real" history that Thomson elevates and fully describes, while foregrounding elements of mythical history that Liberty mentions only in passing, and establishes a more consistent rhythm for his verse, though his poem offers a more complicated and suggestive account of cultural progress. The Pindaric ode's structure of "turns," "counter-turns," and "stands" allows Collins to counterpoint the traditional, continuous accounts of progress with mythological tales about England's past. By assigning different historical episodes to separate strophes and epodes, Collins uses a more allusive and discontinuous style, blending fiction and reality.

Whereas Thomson narrates the "true," complete progress of Liberty from classical times to the present, Collins riddles his much shorter account with gaps, discontinuities, and events of a more ambiguous historical character. Introducing a greater level of psychological complexity to the progress poem, one of Collins's typical gestures is to deny the accuracy of what he is about to tell us, or deliberately to excuse himself from recounting a painful or unpleasant event, using the trope of preterition:

No, Freedom, no, I will not tell,
How Rome, before thy weeping Face,
With heaviest Sound, a Giant-statue, fell,
Push'd by a wild and artless Race.

Besides this refusal to describe the fall of a monumental city, Collins also does not explain the loss of an ancient Druid temple. He confesses to a lack of knowledge, specifically his inability to determine which race, or even whether nature itself, committed the vandalism:

Whether the fiery-tressed Dane,
Or Roman's self o'erturn'd the Fane,
Or in what Heav'n-left Age it fell,
'Twere hard for modern Song to tell.

To introduce his partially revealed vision of a lost Druid temple, Collins collapses his account of its legendary construction with the work he will perform in the poem, to recreate it poetically. Again, a lost past can only be partially recovered:

How may the Poet now unfold,
What never Tongue or Numbers told?
How learn delighted, and amaz'd
What Hands unknown that Fabric rais'd?

Preterition can be one of the most disingenuous rhetorical figures, often calling more attention to what it omits than would tacit omission altogether, as when Richard Nixon refused to consider the "Catholic Question" in his debates with John F. Kennedy. As Fredric V. Bogel observes, Collins addresses his personifications of the past in a way that transforms elegiac lament to ode-like, immediate confrontation; that is to say, he converts the lost past to the "insubstantial," tentative, or fleeting present. Readers of the ode thus may empathize with the fallen cities or delight in the harmoniously resurrected temple of Liberty. Nonetheless, Collins seems also to desire a true forgetting that will leave the audience in a shadowy zone between fact and fiction, to construct a revived mythology that will leave much of the poem's credibility to intangible hopes, faith, and inspiration. The ode creates a mythological realm of history, a structure of gained and lost freedom that supersedes the chronicle of Thomson's blankverse georgic vision. Collins dissolves the concrete historical facts of Thomson's story and supplies the materials of myth, ritual, and remote legend in its place. These poetic fictions do not suggest a wish for a true return to an idealized prelapsarian Druid England, and thus an evasion of historical responsibility, but serve rather as a metaphor for an imperfect world of hope, anticipation of new Liberty, freedom, and peace.

Although their goals for the progress of British Liberty are compatible, the means of attaining this, the responses to contemporary history, and the moral stances in the two poems differ dramatically. Thomson's course of history includes commercial, aesthetic, and governmental prototypes of British Liberty, a panoramic view that depends on a highly codified scheme of events in which Greece and Rome serve as the cultural ancestors of England. Again, Collins's view of history should be distinguished from this because, although it too is a Whig poem that fosters hope for peace in republican forms of government, it places little emphasis on the enlightening effects of commerce and industry and tends to replace these with a set of affective conditions for security and national protection. More importantly, the "history" of Collins's poem does not at all recount events in the manner of a factual chronicle but resists strict reference to the outside world and instead generates its historical scheme through the formal structure of the poem, with repetitions, symmetries, and brief fables that require the reader to make tentative connections among parts. For example, the Romans are both victims of the "Northern Sons of Spoil" when their empire falls and possibly aggressors upon the British when (or if indeed) they destroy the Druid temple. These symmetrical destructive acts, mentioned respectively in the beginning strophe and the final epode, complicate the straightforward, sequential "Whig Progress" of history. The arrangement of these scenes in the ode implies that Britain has already had and lost its golden age, and that Rome has fallen because of uncontrollable outside forces—ironically, those nations to which Liberty eventually succeeds in traditional progress pieces—and not internal political corruption, as Thomson more characteristically claims. Further, the ode disrupts the very logic of linear progress by inverting the literal chronological sequence, starting with Rome's destruction and ending with a restored vision of mythic England. This recursive, counter-progressive pattern, as well as the suggestion that freedom may have originated in northern, not Mediterranean nations, undermines the traditional story, the consecutive rises and falls of ancient and medieval European cities as sites of Liberty. Qualifying his digressions from a straightforward "progress" by calling attention to their partially fictional or mythological status, Collins reminds us that none of his stories is ascertainable, belonging as they do to the realm of legend or pure speculation. Ultimately, he attempts to find an idealized, precultural, harmonious state of British freedom, before the history of international aggression, in mythological analogues such as the Temple of Liberty.

This desire for moral purity and freedom from violence demands a retreat from "progressive" history, if only to defer its necessarily destructive consequences. In expressing these wishes, perhaps Collins renders a pessimistic answer to one of the continual concerns in Liberty, the seemingly inevitable corruption of even the best governments. Thomson plainly asserts that this corruption ensues when nations such as ancient Greece are denied "Liberty of Mind" by "Systems" and "Soul-enslaving Creeds." Yet the poet of Liberty tends to assume a didactic posture when summarizing the lessons of history for his audience, and this moralizing tone is completely absent from Collins, who may not have been convinced by Thomson's directives. For example, to overcome an extensive state of political corruption and ideological obfuscation, Thomson's goddess of Liberty insists that a united sense of purpose among those of otherwise different allegiances can redeem the nation, a moral imperative that thinly veils its partisan basis, Bolingbroke's Oppositionist coalition of Whigs and Tories against Walpole:

If any nobler Passion yet remain,
Let all my Sons all Parties fling aside,
Despise their Nonsense, and together join;

Let Worth and Virtue, scorning low Despair,
Exerted full, from every Quarter shine,
Commix'd in heighten'd Blaze.

Collins refrains from suggesting such judgmental and polemical moral expedients, along with the assumption that the destiny of a nation lies in the hands of its public leaders. Instead, Collins posits and questions the possible conditions for the arrival of Liberty in England: what heroic action is possible in the contemporary political, cultural, or moral climate? what deeds can contemporary patriotic poetry celebrate or seek? what qualities of independence, hope, or endurance are needed in 1746, a time of danger at home and abroad?

To answer these questions, one may examine some further ways in which Collins redirects some traditional devices of the "progress piece." Each poet's depiction of a Platonic Temple of Liberty, a topos that supposedly illustrates the continuities between Thomson and Collins, reveals obviously different functions for this allegorical tableau and indicates a subtle, ambivalent response of the later to the earlier poet. Thomson invokes this idealized state in order to account for the absence of Liberty from European nations during the Middle Ages. The goddess of Liberty tells the curious poet that her spirit has departed from the world during the "wintry Age" much as the "Tribes Aërial" migrate southward in colder seasons. Accounting for the hiatus in cultural progress between Classical Rome and the Renaissance, Thomson also uses this digression to hint at the humanly unattainable ideal of his poem, a Miltonically-tinged portrait of cultural heaven:

In the bright Regions there of purest Day,
Far other Scenes, and Palaces, arise,
Adorn'd profuse with other Arts divine.
All Beauty here below, to them compar'd,
Would, like a Rose before the mid-day Sun,
Shrink up it's [sic] Blossom; like a Bubble break
The passing poor Magnificence of Kings.
For there the King of Nature, in full Blaze,
Calls every Splendor forth; and there his Court
Amid Ætherial Powers, and Virtues, holds:
Angel, Archangel, tutelary Gods,
Of Cities, Nations, Empires, and of Worlds.
But Sacred be the Veil, that kindly clouds
A Light too keen for Mortals,; [sic] wraps a View
Too softening Fair, for Those that here in Dust
Must chearful toil out their appointed Years
A Sense of higher Life would only damp
The School-Boy's Task, and spoil his playful Hours.

Not surprisingly, Thomson grants great material wealth to the spiritual forms of virtue, "Angel, Archangel, tutelary Gods," whose wisdom and beauty the intensity of divine light conceals. True to the poem's unremitting Whig ideology, a secular commercial and cultural heaven also justifies the menial labor of those who "chearful toil out their appointed Years," as if this ideal is the common man's spiritual reward. Thomson withholds a full view of this scene from mortal eyes, and resorts to one of his favorite metaphors in this poem, childhood, to characterize life on earth in relation to the grand scheme of cultural progress. These lines come from a speech by the goddess of Liberty that closes part 3 and helps effect the broad historical leap from medieval Italy to Britain after the Renaissance and into the mid-eighteenth century. In the next two books Britain will represent the highest earthly manifestation of the goddess's cultural ideals, but in a poem about continuing progress, the rhetorical scheme of the history must always leave room for improvement, especially if the poet wishes to conclude with the "infancy" of Liberty in Britain. The inevitable decline of Liberty, depicted in Thomson's accounts of Greece, Rome, and Italy, is inherent in the westward progress of civilization. Thus this brief glimpse of an immutable ideal of progress gives the already advanced state of English culture even higher goals toward which it may strive, or at least a spiritual model that governs its secular activity.

Collins also draws a supernal model of Liberty, but enlarges upon its function in his ode. Rather than making the Temple of Liberty the final goal of all progressive teleologies, he meditates upon this emblem about the problematic conditions of national freedom. Collins describes its embodiment in a mythic England, for he wishes to recover the spirit of the lost Druid temples, reminders of a supernatural past when spiritual figures roamed the earth. Various elements from other parts of Thomson's poem have also infiltrated this passage: the Temple is an architectural mixture of Gothic and Grecian forms, or traditions of northern and Mediterranean liberty; the Druids are also the spiritual ancestors of current British independence. The ode, however, is unique in restoring the importance of the visionary poet to the temple:

Yet still, if Truth those Beams infuse,
Which guide at once, and charm the Muse,
Beyond yon braided Clouds that lie,
Paving the light-embroider'd Sky:
Amidst the bright pavilion'd Plains,
The beauteous Model still remains.

…..

Ev'n now before his favor'd Eyes,
In Gothic pride it seems to rise!
Yet Grœcia's graceful Orders join
Majestic thro' the mix'd Design;
The secret Builder knew to chuse,
Each sphere-found Gem of richest Hues:
Whate'er Heav'n's purer Mold contains,
When nearer Suns emblaze its Veins.

The poet has now become the "favor'd" beholder of this vision, if not the surrogate builder. He alone reveals the story that has never been told and endows it with features that only he can communicate, and thus represent to the nation. The allusive and ceremonial nature of this scene, however, enables Collins's ascent towards visionary poetry, a movement away from the strictly cultural record of Liberty and toward eternal truths about inherent English freedom. The mythological apparatus becomes part of the legendary setting and is not simply one more vehicle for recounting the deeds of the past or appropriating a native tradition of Liberty strictly from the facts. This temple is not like Thomson's, a secular narrative substitution to account for the absence of authentic freedom during any particular time or to show a providential Liberty guiding history. In contrast, Collins has departed from the course of real time in this and the previous strophe, to contemplate the shadowy mythical past of Britain rather than progressing to any current phenomena in a linear historical way. His ode builds up to an almost exclusively psychological, intuitive state; an anticipation of liberty; a collective national anxiety. The political themes are also further complicated in this half-factual, half-mythical Whiggish progress, an ambivalent hope for international concord, if not for a Pax Britannica. A consideration of Thomson's more explicitly polemical messages will reinforce the major differences.

The tone of Liberty rarely falls short of firm confidence in the progressive strength of Britain's cultural, economic, and political institutions. As noted, Thomson places himself in the role of an innocent child in order to assume a position of incomplete knowledge, an intimation of Liberty's arrival but hardly a full understanding of her potential, especially regarding England's destiny. Thomson, the author of the unabashedly patriotic song "Rule, Britannia," wishes to assert a scheme of meliorism, in which England's best years lie ahead. Yet there are perils, perhaps unanticipated, that await an author who assumes an innocent faith in the future greatness of his state and believes in its current progress, limited only by the periodic need to dispense with corrupt political leaders. In what amounts to a virtual compendium of eighteenth-century Whig historical models, Thomson makes no apologies for his jingoism, which, besides promoting a straightforwardly Oppositionist view of internal politics, often expresses an unbounded desire for British commercial dominance overseas:

Theirs the Triumph be,
By deep Invention's keen pervading Eye,
The Heart of Courage, and the Hand of Toil,
Each conquer'd Ocean staining with their Blood,
Instead of Treasure robb'd by ruffian War,
Round social Earth to circle fair Exchange,
And bind the Nations in a golden Chain.

The Winds and Seas are Britain'S wide Domain;
And not a Sail, but by Permission, spreads.

Thomson's bluntly asserted confidence in a belligerent mercantile superiority often produces unintentional humor, but sometimes his claims reveal crises in national ideology that are exposed in their full contradictory state, willingly or not. In a section dealing with upper-class abuse of wealth by gambling, idle luxury, and excessive debt, Thomson invokes a not-so-innocent metaphor of the noble savage:

Such luxurious and idle vices stand in pronounced opposition to the main intention of Liberty, to promote civic humanism, a combination of "INDEPENDENT LIFE; / INTEGRITY IN OFFICE; and, … / … A PASSION FOR THE COMMONWEAL. Although Thomson unquestionably scorns those who abuse their wealth and proper station in society, his chain of comparisons raises some disturbing ideological contradictions. As long as a patrician leader holds on to independent "virtue," or freedom from political corruption and economic obligation (vices that Walpole's government routinely embodies for Thomson), his moral character holds greater "wealth" than the rich who are implicated in the false economy of gambling and, more generally, "luxury" or self-interested expenditure. Yet the "unsqueez'd Favourite," any member of the landed classes who can lend money and thus be drawn into his peers' mutually destructive cycle of debt, is potentially the victim of others' vices, just as the "virtuous" slave is potentially the victim of British economic depredation, and perhaps more importantly, just as the virtuous independent gentleman may be corrupted by political engagement. Even if one disregards Thomson's ambivalent representation of the slave trade—it may involve "pilfering" but also instills a tragically innocent moral character in its victims, and undoubtedly propels the mercantile economy—this metaphor still leaves a larger problem unanswered, namely the servitude of the "independent" civic leader to the goals of the nation and his possible implication in debased politics. The fiercest expressions of Thomson's moral anxiety are directed mainly towards internal corruption, and, except for his objections to Walpole's pacifist trade policy with France, he deprecates any show of military force, prefers a Pax Britannica or a commercial empire of "free" trade, and frequently appeals to classical republicanism or a native tradition of British civil rights to assure a peaceful national order. Nonetheless, the poet of Liberty draws a rigidly polemical division between good and evil, and many of the terms that define this opposition are politically encoded. For example, when Thomson promotes "thrift" and "industry" over "luxury" and "indolence," he signals his loyal attachment to antiministerial Whig mercantile politics and chastises those who do not care to march under this banner. Besides accepting any policies of commercial dominance and their possible ill consequences, like slavery, the individual whom Thomson entreats to be "independent" has a sharply defined enemy among his compatriots and must unite with his fellow civic leaders to eradicate this inner evil. Not able to reconcile his faith in commercial progress with the venal reality of political leadership, Thomson eventually settles for the private innocence of his ideal patrician class. The independent man's "little Kingdom" becomes a retreat from the corrupt political arena:

Mean time true-judgin moderate Desires,

Oeconomy and Taste, combin'd, direct
His clear Affairs, and from debauching Fiends
Secure his little Kingdom.

As will be explained, Collins recognizes a similar dilemma when he attempts to reconcile his patriotism with his poetic role as a spokesman for the nation's conscience. Yet his efforts reflect a more thoroughgoing engagement with both national and individual moral responsibilities. To a lesser extent than Thomson's progress piece, Collins's ode belongs to a genre of Whig panegyrics that entertain ideas of a British peace and rely upon republican rhetoric to take a stance on contemporary political affairs. Just as Thomson has Walpole's politics in mind when he assaults vice and corruption, so too does Collins allude to Britain's detrimental and self-incriminating role in the War of Austrian Succession. He invites Concord to arrive at "Britain's ravag'd Shore," a metaphoric projection of a country's anguish over its military losses on the Continent, even if ravagings closer to home, such as the Pretender's uprising of 1745, were also a recent fear. The usually inert matter of the progress poem's tour through Europe takes on a new life because of the Continent's vulnerability to war. The ode includes topical references to the Austrian conquest of Genoa ("Sad Liguria's bleeding State" and The Netherlands, a current battleground. Collins invigorates the "common places" of the progress so that they allude to the current plight of international liberty through the traditional historical tour of southern and western European states. But Collins's vision of peace is not as straightforward a matter as Thomson's; it depends on factors unrelated to industry and a watchful check of corruption. To show that historical vicissitudes may undermine the greatest freedoms and contaminate a nation's moral character, Collins reflects on his country's engagement in war. The representations of Liberty in his poem are always accompanied by violence and debilitating damage, and his guiding personification is always in flight, taking refuge from repeated dangers. After the downfall of Rome, portrayed allegorically as the vandalism of a "Giant-statue," the only remains of Liberty are the occasionally found fragments of the whole classical ideal:

Yet ev'n, where'er the least appear'd,
Th' admiring World thy Hand rever'd;
Still 'midst the scatter'd States around,
Some Remnants of Her Strength were found;
They saw by what escap'd the Storm,
How wond'rous rose her perfect Form;
How in the great the labour'd Whole,
Each mighty Master pour'd his Soul!

Detecting yet another detail that hints at the instability of freedom, Paul Sherwin has observed that in the procession at the poem's conclusion, it is not Liberty but rather a syntactically shifted substitution of Concord that arrives—perhaps implying that Liberty is only an ideal and that peace with France may be attained but not necessarily with individual freedom guaranteed. In any event, this is a poem where Collins frustratedly tries to transcend the "ravag'd" political milieu of his time and hark back to an idealistic tradition for a solution. This attempt to recover the past may result in momentary tranquility at the cost of discovering the present ideological imprisonment, the inability of the poet to speak out conclusively as either an enraged prophet or a druidic visionary. The conditions of Collins's struggle are worth investigating, however, for they illuminate the contradictions among political ideology, inherited poetic forms, and jarring historical circumstance. Put simply, these are attempts to transcend Whiggish claims by writing an ode in 1746 that substantially departs from patriotic conventions and resists the facile conclusion of accepting a happy, productive, progressive state. The author of odes to Fear, Pity, and Mercy also develops new ground for an individualistic, psychologically expressive voice of national political concern.

As a politically responsive poet, Collins does not merely accept the conventional rhetoric of a "Whig panegyric" at face value, but uses his ode to critique and modify the inherited ideology. Aside from an international vision that equates Liberty with free trade, cultural progress, and benevolent autonomous republicanism, a number of Whig code words pervade the poem. Referring to the idealized temple of Liberty as a mixture of "Gothic Pride" and "Grœcia's graceful Orders," the poet draws upon an intricate network of meanings, which extend beyond the purely aesthetic notions of "energy" and "form." The connotations of "Gothic," however harmless its context might seem, were by no means fixed even as late as 1746. Even if a new wave of "Gothic" architecture was becoming fashionable and helping to grant the term an apolitical sense, this trend should not obscure some other contemporary senses of the word, such as its use in political writings to refer to "constitutional and democratic forms of government" and its original denotation of a wild northern tribe. The architectural terms correspond to the vocabulary of contemporary political debates on the merits of constitutional governments based in popular rights versus a strong "Grecian" monarchy with "vested aristocratic interests," though Collins mainly suggests a reconciliation between "Gothic" and "classical" models of Whig republicanism, with his pun on the "Orders" of a "mix'd Design"—i.e., a balanced but class-stratified government. These senses of "Gothic" and "Grecian" may seem to overdetermine a portrait of a temple that plainly embodies a "concord" of mixed desires, passion and order, or self and society, or even the northern and Mediterranean traditions of European Liberty's progress. Yet Collins shows that he is alert to the political meanings in a poem that continually depicts conflicts between personal liberty and governmental order with no particular resolution other than frustration. The temple, then, allegorizes the precarious coexistence of individual liberty and state order, each of which can quickly degenerate into, respectively, barbarism and tyranny. This pattern of unending violent confrontations holds true from the very beginning of the poem, where Time's "Northern Sons of Spoil" invade classical Rome, and continues through the descriptions of Liberty historically threatened by external violence—e.g., the persecution of William Tell during Austria's fourteenth-century invasion of Switzerland, the Spanish suppression of the 1567 Protestant revolt in The Netherlands. Conversely, the ode reveals that Liberty has needed to assert herself through acts of violence such as revenge upon tyrants or a mythic geological cataclysm that literally tears Britain from the continent, an allegory of "natural" but disruptively forceful independence. Most importantly, in the fables that the ode strings together, Collins concedes that the origins of a free, culturally developed state are based in acts of mutual destruction and personal sacrifices, not all of which are honorable. As Walter Benjamin would assert over two hundred years later, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

In any poem that recounts some characteristic struggles of Liberty in Western civilization, each event enacts a different form of violence. Sometimes they are legends about individual heroes or events, and at other times they are allegorical depictions, like the "Giant-statue" Rome that Gothic Vandals overturn and shatter. As the poem progresses, moving deeply into the realm of the legendary and supernatural, Collins incorporates this cycle of liberty and violence into a natural myth; that is, he not only traces this pattern historically, but digresses through "Time's backward Rolls" to create a myth of origin and choose a set of legends that explains some ambiguous circumstances surrounding the ideal of Liberty. Among these problems, the poem asks why Liberty is weaker now than it once was and seems "lost"; why the need to engage in violent military action is inseparably linked to Liberty; why a desire for peace at any cost can outweigh a desire for genuine Liberty. Thus Concord, rather than Liberty, actually arrives on Britain's "ravag'd Shore" at the poem's visionary conclusion. This is a figure who successfully lulls Anger and Rage into a temporary state of British social harmony, international security, and personal solace.

The fables in the ode, culminating in the final vision of the temple, neither evade present social reality nor offer a political solution that a poet can propose with a clean conscience. On the whole, they depict a lost age of Liberty in an attempt to grasp the full, contradictory nature of the tensions between individual freedom and national politics. Collins is no less nationalistic than Thomson: he takes pride in Britain's "blest Divorce" from the Continent and adorns this privileged isle with tutelary spirits who "check … the west'ring Tide." Yet a poet who fully understands the vicissitudes of time, its effects upon nations, and the struggles that accompany the birth and sustenance of liberty, can hope only to arrest the tide or momentarily to defer "progress." Collins ultimately surrenders to political expediency; whatever solution is soothing to the nation is acceptable to him. The temple that the poet unveils, however much it recounts the triumphant battles and indigenous energies of legendary Britain, is also a trope that freezes the destructive course of time or, in psychological terms, sublimates further violent impulses:

There on the Walls the Patriot's Sight,
May ever hang with fresh Delight,
And, grav'd with some Prophetic Rage,
Read Albion's Fame thro' ev'ry Age.

Even the poet is implicated in this contradictory monument to the national heritage. On the one hand, the temple helps to define an inherently nationalistic character and record a mythologized history of British triumphs, much as Collins does in the latter third of his ode. On the other hand, the movement is a halting, quieting one that suppresses both the fury of the military heroes, now "retir'd in Glory," and the "Rage" of the poetic voice, now "grav'd" (implying both inscription and death) on the temple walls. Thus Collins adopts an anxiously patriotic but nonetheless passive role in accepting but not daring to speak out in "Prophetic Rage" against British involvement in the War of Austrian Succession. This militarism could be countered only by the politically expedient negotiations for peace taking place in late autumn 1746 at Breda.

To his favor, and in contrast to Thomson, Collins does not see Liberty as a pure ideal and does not subscribe to a politically partisan ethics that blames the loss of Liberty on the corruption of leaders and influential citizens. There is no "Walpole" in this poem whom Collins can scapegoat as the most serious threat to freedom. The psychological complexity of Collins's ode can only locate violence and freedom on two sides of the same coin, a relationship illustrated by the heroic youths who must murder tyrants in order to liberate Athens, "At once the Breath of Fear and Virtue shedding." Liberty cannot exist without violence towards some oppressor, but when it does thrive, violence from a potential threat is always imminent. The seeds of destruction are almost inevitably sown into Liberty, as in medieval Florence before the Medicis dominated and "quench'd her Flame," when they became patrons of the arts without allowing republican democracy. The repetitions of archetypal transgressions within the ode—for example, the desecration of temples or sacred statues, the murder of tyrants during the festival of Athena—only make the situation of Liberty more psychologically complicated, without being any less relevant to immediate history than in Thomson.

To the terrifying circumstances attendant upon Liberty, the conclusion offers perhaps the best response that can be hoped for. A wish for Concord and Peace instead of Liberty is consistent with the pattern of the rest of the poem, a desire to arrest the bloody cycle of liberation and violence, and for the deferring, even the purgation, of time with a deceptive retreat from factual history and a checking of the "west'ring Tide." The way to gain Liberty, then, is not to assume a British monopoly upon it like Thomson and attempt to weed out its enemies, for this approach will only perpetuate a cycle of destructive scapegoating and multiply the evils and sorrows that accompany the wish. With his characteristic reluctance to draw moral absolutes, Collins offers no ready-made solution to the same problem, perhaps because he writes from a position less conducive to liberty, namely, the later stages of an unpopular war. His poem, however, is one of anticipation rather than celebration, and even though he faces the future less confidently, Collins suggests a fuller comprehension of liberty, experientially, psychologically, and even historically, for although Thomson provides a greater extent of historical material, it is put in the service of

cataloguing victories or defeats of Liberty, and he too easily dispenses with the possibility that a wish for Liberty may be imperiled and should be accompanied by fear. Even his acknowledgment of political corruption suggests over-optimistically that a change of leaders, a bipartisan Oppositionist coalition, or a period of retirement will cleanse the vices. A truly desirable state of freedom, however, cannot be achieved but can only be imagined, for Collins represents it as the recovery of a lost, innocent, mythic past, a state that he reluctantly prophesies in order to free the nation from the destiny of "real" history and purges with a qualified hope of delayed gratification.

To characterize this change in the means and ends of eighteenth-century political poetry, René Girard's analyses of scapegoating rituals are pertinent to both Collins's and Thomsons's roles in attempting to address public crises and heal the state. In his discussion of sacrificial crises, Girard accounts for the failures of either "too little" or "too much" continuity between the victim and the community.

In the first case, the sacrifice and scapegoating process will be ineffectual because the victim is not capable of attracting the community's violence; in the second case, the differences between "sacred" and "impure" violence may be effaced. One may argue that Thomson's Liberty is a transparent example of the first type of sacrificial crisis, whereas Collins's ode is conscious of and tries to forestall the second. Because Thomson relies on so sharp a distinction between the morally upstanding retired country gentleman and the fallen world of Walpole's political regime (or, by analogy, members of the leisured classes who fall sway to luxury, gambling, and other false economies), he cannot resolve the contradictions between historical fate and individual agency. If the corruption of political leaders is always inevitable, and if the country gentleman loses his advantageous, innocent "prospect" of society by engaging in its reform, then the process of scapegoating is doomed to be reenacted and the advancements of Liberty are undermined in England, just as they have been in classical Greece and Rome.

In contrast, from its very first lines, Collins's "Ode to Liberty" raises some confusion about who needs to oppose whom, and for what cause, in securing national freedom. When he asks the rhetorical questions "Who shall awake the Spartan Fife" and "What New Alcœus, Fancy-blest, / Shall sing the Sword, in Myrtles drest," Collins suggests either that no one in modern society is capable of liberating it from tyrants, or that the situation does not warrant such "heroic" action. The ode depicts a regressive cycle of violent acts that both establish a tenuous Liberty and suppress it, and this history is redeemed only by recourse to the mythological, prelapsarian past of England's original independence and freedom. If the ode's most redemptive gesture is to halt the destructive "progress" of Liberty, to arrest its bloody cycles of violence, then Collins is all too aware of England's complicity in international war or political oppression and cannot in good faith point to an enemy like the French or, in other contexts, the Pretender's allies as victims worthy of sacrifice.