Towards democracy

A Note 513

@ little cottage on a farm (at Bradway, near Sheffield) with 3 friend and his family, and doing farm-work in the intervals oof my lectures. When I threw up the lecturing I had everything clear before me. I knocked together a sort of wooden 2sentinel-box, in the garden, and there, or in the fields and the ywoods, all that spring and summer, and on through the winter, dby day and sometimes by night, in sunlight or in rain, by frost sand snow and all sorts of grey and dull weather, I wrote 2 Towards Democracy ”—or at any rate the first and longer 7 poem that goes by that name.

By the end of 1881 this was finished—though it was worked over and patched a little in the early part of 1882; and I remember feeling then that, defective and halting and incoherent in expression as it was, still if it succeeded in rendering even a half the splendour which inspired it, it would be good, and TI need not trouble to write anything more (which, with due : allowance for the said “if,” I even now feel was a true and ¥ friendly intimation) !

The writing of this and its publication (in 1883) got a load , off my mind which had been weighing on it for years—a sense . of oppression and anxiety which I had constantly suffered - from before—and which I believe, in its different forms, is _ a common experience in the early part of life.

‘In this first poem were embodied with considerable alterations and adaptations a good number of casual pieces, which I had written (merely under stress of feeling and without aay particular sense of proportion) during several preceding years They now found their interpretation under the steady and clear light of a new mood or state of feeling which previously had only visited me fitfully and with clouded beams. The whole of “ Towards Democracy ”—I may say, speaking broadly end including the later pieces—has been written under the

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