frenzied dreams, And turn'd to night the sun's meridian beams.— Hear, Oh Britannia! potent Queen of isles, On whom fair Art, and meek Religion smiles, Now Afric's coasts thy craftier sons invade, And Theft and Murder take the garb of Trade! —The Slave, in chains, on supplicating knee, Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee; With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress'd, 'Are we not Brethren?' sorrow choaks the rest; —Air! bear to heaven upon thy azure flood Their innocent cries!--Earth! cover not their blood! (I.ii.414-430) Reception and legacy The Botanic Garden was reissued repeatedly in Britain, Ireland and the United States throughout the 1790s. Until the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Darwin was considered one of England's preeminent poets. His poems, with their “dynamic vision of change and transformation”, resonated with the ideals of the French revolution. However, when the revolution entered its more radical and bloody phase, scientific progress became associated with what many started to see as a failed revolution. Anti-Jacobins, who were opposed to the French revolution, denounced the sexual freedom gaining ground in France and linked it to the scientific projects of men like Darwin. George Canning and John Frere published a parody of The Loves of the Plants in the Anti-Jacobin Review in 1798 titled “Loves of the Triangles”, suggesting just these connections. Darwin's poems were not published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century as conservative reaction solidified in Britain, although bowdlerized and sentimentalized poems imitating Darwin's became increasingly popular. The analogy between plants and humans lasted well into the nineteenth century; Alice in Wonderland was one of the many books to employ the image. Darwin's high poetic style in the manner of Alexander Pope impressed a young Wordsworth, who called it “dazzling", but Coleridge quipped, "I absolutely nauseate Darwin's poem", Francis Wrangham, in the (staunchly conservative) British Critic, however, did critique Darwin's style; in a review of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads from 1799, the critic noted, "It is not by pomp of words, but by energy of thought, that sublimity is most successfully achieved; and we infinitely prefer the simplicity, even of the most unadorned tale in this volume, to all the meretricious frippery of the Darwinian taste". See also The Unsex'd Females Transmutation of species History of evolutionary thought Works cited Notes Further reading Anonymous. "Loves of