by Oliver » Sat Nov 08, 2003 6:15 pm
The "great Spirits" are William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon. Wordsworth is "he of the Cloud, the Cataract, the Lake"--the natural features of the Lake Country celebrated in Wordsworth's poetry from Lyrical Ballads onwards. "He of the Rose, the Violet and etc is presumably Hunt, who was imprisoned--hence "the Chain for freedom's sake." The poem, which appears in a 20 November, 1816, letter to Haydon, is prophetic--he's saying that his work, and those of his more illustrious Romantic contemporaries, will "give the World another heart/And other pulses.." ie, new modes of feeling and being.