Lost Leader, The

( Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates , No. VII., 1845; Poems , 1849; Dramatic Lyrics , 1868.) A great leader of a party has deserted the cause, fallen away from his early ideals and forsaken the teaching which has inspired disciples who loved and honoured him. They are sorrowful not so much for their own lo as for the moral deterioration he has himself suffered. The poem is a very popular one, and is generally considered to refer to Words worth, who in his youth had strong Liberal sympathies, but lost them, as Mr. John Morley says in his introduction to Words worth’s poems:—“As years began to dull the old penetration of a mind which had once approached, like other youths, the shield of human nature from the golden side, and had been eager to ‘clear a pa age for just government,’ Words worth lost his interest in progre . Waterloo may be taken for the date at which his social grasp began to fail, and with it his poetic glow. He opposed Catholic emancipation as stubbornly as Eldon, and the Reform Bill as bitterly as Croker. For the practical reform of his day, even in education, for which he had always spoken up, Words worth was not a force.” Browning used to see a good deal of Words worth when he was a young man, but there was no friendship between them. Words worth treated with contempt Browning’s republican sympathies—a contempt heightened, as is usually the case with those who have lapsed from their former ideals, by the remembrance that he had once profe ed to follow them. But, though the poem has undoubted reference to Words worth, it has a certain application also to Southey, Charles Kingsley, and others, who in youth were Radicals and in old age became rigidly Conservative. Browning told Walter Thornbury that Words worth was “the lost leader,” though he said “the portrait was purposely disguised a little; used, in short, as an artist uses a model, retaining certain characteristic traits and discarding the rest” ( Notes and Queries , 5th series, vol. i., p. 213.) There is a letter published in Mr. Grosart’s edition of Words worth’s Prose Works , which is conclusive on this point:— “ 19, Warwick Crescent, W. , February 24th, 1875 . “ Dear Mr. Grosart ,—I have been asked the question you now addre me with, and as duly answered, I can’t remember how many times. There is no sort of objection to one more a urance, or rather confe ion, on my part, that I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Words worth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account. Had I intended more—above all, such a boldne as portraying the entire man—I should not have talked about ‘handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon,’ These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet—whose defection, neverthele , accompanied as it was by a regular face-about of his special party, was, to my private apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But, just as in the tapestry on my wall I can recognise figures which have struck out a fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet would be preposterous as a copy; so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the ‘very effigies’ of such a moral and intellectual superiority. “Faithfully yours, “ Robert Browning .”