The panic-struck ocean in agony roars,
Rebounds from the battle, and flies to his shores.
For Britannia is wielding her trident to. day,
Consuming her foes in her ire,
And hurling her thunder with absolute sway
From her wave-ruling chariots of fire ;
-She triumphs ;--the winds and the waters conspire
To spread her invincible name;
The universe rings with her fame;
-But the cries of the fatherless mix with her praise,
And the tears of the widow are shed on her bays!
O Britain! dear Britain! the land of my birth;
O isle, most enchantingly fair!
Thou pearl of the ocean! Thou gem of the earth!
O my mother! my mother! beware;
For wealth is a phantom, and empire a snare:
Olet not thy birth-right be sold
For reprobate glory and gold:
Thy distant dominions like wild graftings shoot,
They weigh down thy trunk,-they will tear up thy root:
The root of thine OAK, O my country! that stands
Rock-planted, and flourishing free;
Its branches are stretch'd over far-distant lands,
And its shadow eclipses the sea:
The blood of our ancestors nourish'd the tree;
From their tombs, from their ashes it sprung;
Its boughs with their trophies are hung;
Their spirit dwells in it :—and hark! for it spoke ;
The voice of our fathers ascends from their oak.
"Ye Britons who dwell where we conquer'd of old,
Who inherit our battle-field graves;
Though poor were your fathers,-gigantic and bold,
We were not, we would not be, slaves;
But firm as our rocks, and as free as our waves,
The spears of the Romans we broke,
We never stoop'd under their yoke;
In the shipwreck of nations we stood up alone,-
The world was great Cæsar's-but Britain our own.
"For ages and ages, with barbarous foes,
The Saxon, Norwegian, and Gaul,
We wrestled, were foil'd, were cast down, but we rose
With new vigour, new life from each fall;
By all we were conquer'd :-WE CONQUER'D THEM ALL!
-The cruel, the cannibal mind,
We soften'd, subdued, and refined;
Bears, wolves, and sea-monsters, they rush'd from their den; We taught them, we tamed them, we turn'd them to men.
"Love led the wild hordes in his flower-woven bands, The tenderest, the strongest of chains!
Love married our hearts, he united our hands,
And mingled the blood in our veins ;
One race we became :-on the mountains and plains,
Where the wounds of our country were closed,
The ark of religion reposed,
The unquenchable altar of liberty blazed,
And the temple of Justice in mercy was raised.
"Ark, altar and temple, we left with our breath
To our children, a sacred bequest!
O guard them, O keep them, in life and in death!
So the shades of your fathers shall rest,
And your spirits with ours be in Paradise blest:
-Let ambition, the sin of the brave,
And avarice, the soul of a slave,
No longer seduce your affections to roam
From liberty, justice, religion, AT HOME!"
We know that these were felt by him,
For these are felt by all.
He suffer'd, but his pangs are o'er;
Enjoy'd-but his delights are fled;
Had friends, his friends are now no more;
And foes, his foes are dead.
He loved, but whom he loved, the grave
Hath lost in its unconscious womb:
O she was fair!—but nought could save
Her beauty from the tomb.
The rolling seasons, day and night,
Sun, moon and stars, the earth and main,
Erewhile his portion, life and light,
To him exist in vain.
He saw whatever thou hast seen,
Encounter'd all that troubles thee;
He was whatever thou hast been ;
He is what thou shall be.
The clouds and sunbeams, o'er his eye
That once their shades and glory threw,
Have left in yonder silent sky
No vestige where they flew.
The annals of the human race,
Their ruins, since the world began,
Of HIM afford no other trace
Than this,-THERE LIVED A MAN!
OF all the murderous trades by mortals plied,
'Tis war alone that never violates
The hallowed day by simulate respect,-
By hypocritic rest: No, no, the work proceeds.
From sacred pinnacles are hung the flags,*
That give the sign to slip the leash from slaughter.
⚫ Church steeples are frequently used as signal-posts.
The bells, whose knoll a holy calmness poured
Into the good man's breast,-whose sound consoled
The sick, the poor, the old-perversion dire-
Pealing with sulphurous tongue, speak death-fraught-words:
From morn to eve destruction revels frenzied,
Till at the hour when peaceful vesper-chimes
Were wont to sooth the ear, the trumpet sounds
Pursuit and flight altern; and for the song
Of larks, descending to their grass-bowered homes,
The croak of flesh-gorged ravens, as they slake
Their thirst in hoof-prints filled with gore, disturbs
The stupor of the dying man: while death
Triumphantly sails down the ensanguined stream,
On corses throned, and crowned with shivered boughs,
That erst hung imaged in the crystal tide.*
And what the harvest of these bloody fields?
A double weight of fetters to the slave,
And chains on arms that wielded freedom's sword.
Spirit of Tell! and art shou doomed to see
Thy mountains, that confessed no other chaind
Than what the wintry elements had forged, s
Thy vales, where freedom, and her stern compeer,
Proud virtuous poverty, their noble state
Maintained, amid surrounding threats of wealth,
Of superstition, and tyrannic sway—
Spirit of Tell! and art thou doomed to see
That land subdued by slavery's basest slaves;
By men, whose lips pronounce the sacred name
Of Liberty, then kiss the despot's foot?
Helvetia hadst thou to thyself been true,
Thy dying sons had triumphed as they fell:
But 'twas a glorious effort, though in vain.
Aloft thy genius, 'mid the sweeping clouds,
The flag of freedom spread; bright in the storm
The streaming meteor waved, and far it gleamed;
But, ah! 'twas transient as the Iris' arch,
Glanced from Leviathan's ascending shower,
When mid the mountain waves heaving his head
Already had the friendly-seeming foe
Possessed the snow-piled ramparts of the land;
Down like an avalanche they rolled, they crushed
The temple, palace, cottage, every work
Of art and nature, in one common ruin.
After a heavy cannonade, the shivered branches of trees, and the corpses
the killed, are seen floating together down the rivers.
The dreadful crash is o'er, and peace ensues,-
The peace of desolation, gloomy, still:
Each day is hushed as Sabbath; but, alas!
No Sabbath-service glads the seventh day!
No more the happy villagers are seen,
Winding adown the rock-hewn paths, that wont
To lead their footsteps to the house of prayer;
But, far apart, assembled in the depth
Of solitudes, perhaps a little groupe
Of aged men, and orphan boys, and maids
Bereft, list to the breathings of the holy man,
Who spurns an oath of fealty to the power
Of rulers chosen by a tyrant's nod.
No more, as dies the rustling of the breeze,
Is heard the distant vesper-hymn ; no more
At gloamin hour, the plaintive strain, that links
His country to the Switzer's heart, delights
The loosening team; or if some shepherd boy
Attempt the strain, his voice soon faultering stops;
He feels his country now a foreign land.
O, Scotland! canst thou for a moment brook
The mere imagination, that a fate
Like this should e'er be thine! that o'er those hills,
And dear-bought vales, whence Wallace, Douglas, Bruce,
Repelled proud Edward's multitudinous hordes,
A gallic foe, that abject race, should rule!
No, no! let never hostile standard touch
Thy shore rush, rush into the dashing brine,
And crest each wave with steel; and should the stamp
Of slavery's footstep violate the strand,
Let not the tardy tide efface the mark ;
Sweep off the stigma with a sea of blood.
Thrice happy he who, far in Scottish glen
Retired (yet ready at his country's call,)
Has left the restless emmet-hill of man!
He never longs to read the saddening tale
Of endless wars; and seldom does he hear
The tale of woe; and ere it reaches him,
Rumour, so loud when new, has died away
Into a whisper, on the memory borne
Of casual traveller ;-As on the deep,
Far from the sight of land, when all around
Is waveless calm, the sudden tremulous swell,
That gently heaves the ship, tells, as it rolls,
Of earthquakes dread, and cities overthrown.
VOL. LXVII.
3 S
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