Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

other’s hands the horrors and humiliations of slavery, exploitation, inequality,

injustice, imprisonment, capital punishment and war, so long will that vision burn in the

hearts of some and at the right time — such as the Nineteen Thirties and, who knows?

maybe the Nineteen Sixties! — it flames up in the hearts of millions the world over.

Where do I stand, gentlemen?

I stand by that vision.

The vision, the basic dream is in the Declaration of Independence, in the Bill of

Rights, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the Communist Manifesto, in the

Gettysburg Address, in the Emancipation Proclamation, in the Four Freedoms. And, believe

it or not, gentlemen, it is in THE PRELUDF, the masterpiece of that old tory, William

Wordsworth, the tory who began as a radical and wrote the only great poem we have about

revolution.

For it is THE PRELUDE, better than anything ever written, that tells us what a period

of reform and revolution, a period like the Thirties is like. Speaking of his own radical

generation, Wordsworth says:

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, us who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven.

Yes, came the dawn, comes the revolution and it is bliss to be alive and to be young is

very heaven; for while we are young, the world is changing, it is being transfigured.

O

times

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law and statute took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself