The Lost Leader (poem)

We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devils'-triumph[5] and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!

Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly, Menace our heart ere we master his own;[6] Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!

[9] Wordsworth in his early days had been a youthful rebel, defended Paine's Rights of Man and the French Revolution, and been described by Coleridge as a 'semi-atheist', and by himself as a 'patriot of the world'.

Her choice is a very able man, and I trust that it will be a happy union, not doubting that they will speak more intelligibly to each other than, notwithstanding their abilities, they have yet done to the public.In 1813 Wordsworth obtained the position of distributor of stamps.

Browning saw this acquiescence to orthodox tradition—with its image of Wordsworth literally on his knees in front of the queen—as his "final surrender to the forces of conservatism".

One editor wrote:[13] The Lost Leader was originally written in reference to Wordsworth's abandonment of the Liberal cause, with perhaps a thought of Southey, but it is applicable to any popular apostasy.

[17] In one ambivalent letter, he wrote:[18][19] I have been asked the question you now address me with, and as duly answered it, I can't remember how many times; there is no sort of objection to one more assurance or rather confession, on my part, that I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerated personality of Wordsworth 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 boldness 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, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face-about of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore.

But just as in the tapestry on my wall I can recognize features which have struck out a fancy, on occasion, that though truly 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.The Lost Leader was used as the title of a book about Wordsworth by Hugh I'Anson Fausset in 1933.

The poem was parodied by Fun (a Victorian competitor of Punch) when the women of Girton College dissolved their Browning Society and spent the funds on chocolate.

[21] In one edition of the poem, the first line had been printed as "Just for a handle of silver he left us", which the proof-reader tried to justify on the grounds that as no one understood Browning, it would be all right.

The title of Joe Haines's memoir of the final years of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government, Glimmers of Twilight,[23] alludes to the poem.