The visions of England Lyrics on leading men and events in English history by Francis T. Palgrave |
MOUNT VERNON
|
The visions of England | ||
MOUNT VERNON
October 5: 1860
—A simple stone of rest, and bare
To all the blessing of the air,—
And Peace came down in sunny flood
From the blue haunts of heaven, and smiled
Upon the household reconciled.
Since in this hermitage of the West
'Mid happy toil and happy rest,
Loving and loved among his own,
His days fulfill'd their fruitful round,
Seeking no more than what they found.
Yet here his country's voice,—the cry
Of man for natural liberty,—
That great Republic in her dawn,
The immeasurable Future,—broke;
And to his fate the Leader woke.
Before the Father-country's eyes,—
—E'en if a parent's rights, unwise,
With that bold Son he grudged to share,
In manhood strong beyond the sea,
And ripe to wed with Liberty!
Looking at the American War of Independence without party-passion and distortion, as should now at least be possible to Englishmen, the main cause must be acknowledged to lie simply in the growth and geographical position of the Colonies, which had brought them to the age of natural liberty, and had begun to fit them for its exercise:—facts which it was equally in accordance with nature that the Fatherland should fail to perceive. For the causes which gradually determined American resistance we must look, (as regards us), not to the blundering English legislation after 1760,—to the formalism of Grenville, the subterfuges of Franklin,—but to the whole course of our commercial policy since the Revolution: As regards the Colonies, to the extinction of the power of France in America by the Treaty of Paris in 1763: (Lecky: ch. v; Mahon: ch. xliii).
The Stamp Act of 1765 brought home, indeed, to a rapidly-developing people the supremacy claimed across the Atlantic; but the obnoxious taxation which it imposed, (despite the splendid sophistry of Chatham), cannot be shown to differ essentially from the trade restrictions and monopolies enacted in long series after 1688, as the result of the predominance obtained at the Revolution by the commercial classes in this country, and which so far as 1765 the colonies openly recognized as legal.
Going, however, beyond these minor motives, the true cause was unquestionably that the time for separate life, for America to be herself, had come. This was a crisis which home-legislation could do little to create or to avert: a natural law, which only worked itself out ostensibly by political manœuvres and military operations, so ill-managed as to be rarely creditable to either side;—and, regarded simply as a ‘struggle for existence,’ is, in the eye of impartial history, hardly within the scope of praise or censure.
But it was a neutrally tinted background like this, which could most effectually bring into full relief the great qualities of the one great man who was prominent in the conflict.
With what unselfish patient skill,
Clear-piercing flame of changeless will,
The one high heart that moved alone
Sedate through the chaotic strife,—
He taught mankind the hero-life!
Clothed in marmoreal calm divine,
Veils all that strength 'neath beauty's line,
All energy in repose enfolds;—
So He, in self-effacement great,
Magnanimous to endure and wait.
Master of Fate through self-control
And utter stainlessness of soul!
Prompt with both hands to welcome in
The white-wing'd Peace he warr'd to win!
The liberal leisure of the farm,
The garden joy, the wild-wood charm;
Life ebbing to its perfect close
Like some white altar-lamp that pales
And self-consumed its light exhales.
Against life's tender flickering flame;
No tropic gloom in terror came;
Slow waning as a summer-spring
The soul breathed out herself, and slept,
And to the end her beauty kept.
Throng round the child, unseen but felt,
So by his couch his nation knelt,
Loving and worshipping with her tears:—
Tears!—late amends for all that debt
Due to the Liberator yet!
O'er all the lavish region roll,
And realm on realm, from pole to pole,
In one beneath thy stars be bound:
The far-off centuries as they flow,
No whiter name than this shall know!
Larger, not greater, yet!—With joy
Of generous hearts ye hail'd the Boy
Who bow'd before the sacred grave,
With Love's fair freight across the sea
Sped from the Fatherland to thee!
Blest in his Mother's rule revered,
On popular love a kingdom rear'd,
And rooted in the years unknown, —
Land rich in old Experience' store
And holy legacies of yore,
From the high heaven look'd out:—and saw
This other later realm of Law,
Of that old household first-born true,
And lord of half a world!—and smiled
Upon the nations reconciled.
The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most distinguished of his hosts said, ‘an unwritten treaty of amity and alliance.’
Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral, was the family seat of Augustine, father to George Washington, and the residence of the latter from 1752. But all his early years also had been spent in that neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed his ideal of life: and thither, on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he retired in 1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with all the strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman of Vergil's type. And there (Dec. 1799) was he buried.
The visions of England | ||