Poems original and translated :: :: University of Virginia Library

That day was all o'erspread with gloom of blackest night,
Which saw the Roman eagle stoop, to take his parting flight.
No pœans then were heard, nor hymns of liberty,
But lamentations loud and long, and many a boding cry.
Yet freedom, which with force resistless arms the brave,
Has power to raise the coward soul, and renovate the slave;
And forty years of doubtful and bloody strife attest
That servitude has not destroy'd the virtues it repress'd.

304

At length, in evil hour, the British prince dismay'd,
To quell his Scottish foes, besought the Saxon pirates' aid.
Bold Hengist seized the moment, by fate propitious lent,
Claim'd for his fee dominion, and became First King of Kent.
Him other chieftains follow'd, with like desire possess'd,
And Ælla ruled it in the south, and Cerdic in the west.
Still, as the danger thicken'd, the more to meet it rose
The spirit which, in noble minds, with opposition grows:
Then lived renownéd Arthur, who, as old stories tell,
Was begotten of a dragon, with aid of Merlin's spell.
But of him, or his queen Guiniver, or the “fifty good and able
Knights, that resorted unto him, and were of his round table,”
I need no more relate, nor of “Lancelot du lake,
Nor Tristram de Léonnois, who fought for ladies' sake,”
Nor of the famous battle o'er traitor Mordred won,
Nor how the hero sleeping lies in the isle of Avalon;
Dreams once received as true in lordly hall and bower;
The solace since of age and youth in many a vacant hour;
But now no longer prized, while all they seem to show
Is, that there lived in Britain, thirteen hundred years ago,

305

A valiant native prince, who his country's cause upheld,
And Cerdic, with his ravagers, at Badon's mount repell'd.