University of Virginia Library

O faithful Love, by Poverty embraced!
Thy heart is fire, amid a wintry waste;
Thy joys are roses, born on Hecla's brow;
Thy home is Eden, warm amid the snow;
And she, thy mate, when coldest blows the storm,
Clings then most fondly to thy guardian form;
E'en as thy taper gives intensest light,
When o'er thy bow'd roof darkest falls the night.
Oh, if thou e'er hast wrong'd her, if thou e'er
From those mild eyes hast caused one bitter tear
To flow unseen, repent, and sin no more!
For richest gems, compared with her, are poor;
Gold, weigh'd against her heart, is light—is vile;
And when thou sufferest, who shall see her smile?
Sighing, ye wake, and sighing sink to sleep,
And seldom smile, without fresh cause to weep;
(Scarce dry the pebble, by the wave dash'd o'er,
Another comes, to wet it as before;)
Yet, while in gloom your freezing day declines,
How fair the wintry sunbeam when it shines!
Your foliage, where no summer leaf is seen,
Sweetly embroiders earth's white veil with green;
And your broad branches, proud of storm-tried strength,
Stretch to the winds in sport their stalwart length,
And calmly wave, beneath the darkest hour,
The ice-born fruit, the frost-defying flower.
Let Luxury, sickening in profusion's chair,
Unwisely pamper his unworthy heir,
And, while he feeds him, blush and tremble too!
But, Love and Labour, blush not, fear not you!
Your children, (splinters from the mountain's side,)
With rugged hands, shall for themselves provide.
Parent of valour, cast away thy fear!
Mother of men, be proud without a tear!
While round your hearth the woe-nursed virtues move,
And all that manliness can ask of Love;
Remember Hogarth, and abjure despair,
Remember Arkwright, and the peasant Clare.
Burns, o'er the plough, sung sweet his wood-notes wild,
And richest Shakspeare was a poor man's child.
Sire, green in age, mild, patient, toil-inured,
Endure thine evils, as thou hast endured.
Behold thy wedded daughter, and rejoice!
Hear hope's sweet accents in a grandchild's voice!
See Freedom's bulwarks in thy sons arise,
And Hampden, Russell, Sidney, in their eyes!
And should some new Napoleon's curse subdue
All hearths but thine, let him behold them too,
And timely shun a deadlier Waterloo!

Northumbrian vales! ye saw, in silent pride,
The pensive brow of lowly Akenside,
When, poor, yet learn'd, he wander'd young and free,
And felt within the strong divinity.
Scenes of his youth, where first he woo'd the Nine,
His spirit still is with you, vales of Tyne!
As when he breathed, your blue-bell'd paths along,
The soul of Plato into British song.

Born in a lowly hut an infant slept,
Dreamful in sleep, and, sleeping, smiled or wept:
Silent the youth—the man was grave and shy:
His parents loved to watch his wondering eye:
And, lo! he waved a prophet's hand, and gave,
Where the winds soar, a pathway to the wave!
From hill to hill bade air-hung rivers stride,
And flow through mountains with a conqueror's pride:
O'er grazing herds, lo! ships suspended sail,
And Brindley's praise hath wings in every gale!

The worm came up to drink the welcome shower;
The redbreast quaff'd the rain-drop in the bower;
The flaskering duck through freshen'd lilies swam;
The bright roach took the fly below the dam;
Ramp'd the glad colt, and cropp'd the pensile spray;
No more in dust uprose the sultry way;
The lark was in the cloud; the woodbine hung
More sweetly o'er the chaffinch while he sung;
And the wild rose, from every dripping bush,
Beheld on silvery Sheaf the mirror'd blush;
When calmly seated on his pannier'd ass,
Where travellers hear the steel hiss as they pass,
A milkboy, sheltering from the transient storm,
Chalk'd, on the grinder's wall, an infant's form;
Young Chantrey smiled; no critic praised or blamed;
And golden promise smiled, and thus exclaim'd—
“Go, child of genius! rich be thine increase;
Go—be the Phidias of the second Greece!”

Greece! thou art fallen, by luxury o'erthrown,
Not vanquish'd by the Man of Macedon!
For ever fall'n! and Sculpture fell with thee.
But from the ranks of British poverty
A glory hath burst forth, and matchless powers
Shall make th' eternal grace of Sculpture ours.
The eternal grace? Alas! the date assign'd
To works, call'd deathless, of creative mind,
Is but a speck upon the sea of days;
And frail man's immortality of praise,
A moment to th' eternity of Time,
That is, and was, and shall be the sublime,
The unbeginning, the unending sea,
Dimensionless as God's infinity!
England, like Greece, shall fall, despoil'd, defaced.
And weep, the Tadmor of the watery waste.
The wave shall mock her lone and manless shore;
The deep shall know her freighted wealth no more;
And unborn wanderers, in the future wood
Where London stands, shall ask where London stood?
As melt the clouds at summer's feet sublime,
The burning forests of noon's fiery clime;
So, art and power, with freedom, melt away
In long prosperity's unclouded ray.
Let soul-sick minstrels sing of myrtle bowers,
And diadem the brow of Love with flowers,
Matured where earth brings forth the rack and scourge,
And ruthless tortures languid labours urge.
Slaves! where ye toil for tyrants, Love is not:
Love's noblest temple is the freeman's cot!
What though each blast its humble thatch uptear?
Bold shall the tyrant be that enters there.
Look up and see, where, throned on alpine snow,
Valour disdains the bondsman's vales below:
So, Love, companion of the wolf, may roam,
And in the desert find a boundless home;
But will not bow the knee to pomp and pride,
Where slaves of slaves with hate and fear reside.
What are the glories that Oppression throws
Around his vainly-guarded throne of woes;
The marbles of divinity, and all
That decks pale Freedom's pomp of funeral?
Let Grandeur's home, o'er subject fields and floods,
Rise, like a mountain clad in wintry woods,
And columns tall, of marble wrought, uphold
The spiry roof, and ceilings coved in gold;
But better than the palace and the slave
Is Nature's cavern that o'erlooks the wave,
Rock-paved beneath, and granite-arch'd above,
If Independence sojourn there with Love!

Star of the heart! O still on Britain smile,
Of old thy chosen, once thy favour'd isle,
And by the nations, envious and unbless'd,
Call'd thine and Freedom's Eden in the west!
Then hymns to Love arose from every glen,
Each British cottage was thy temple then.
But now what Demon blasts thy happiest land,
And bids thine exiled offspring crowd the strand;
Or pens in festering towns the victim swain,
And sweeps thy cot, thy garden, from the plain?
Lo! where the pauper idles in despair,
Thy Eden droops, for blight and dearth are there!
And, like an autumn floweret, lingering late,
Scarce lives a relic of thy happier state—
A wreck of peace and love, with sadness seen,
That faintly tells what England once hath been!
Amid coeval orchards, grey with age,
Screen'd by memorial elms from winter's rage.
Scarce stands a shed, where virtue loves to be,
A hut of self-dependent poverty,
Where want pines proudly, though distress and fear
Stain thy mute votary with too sad a tear;
And yet I feel thine altar still is here—
Here, where thy Goldsmith's too prophetic strain,
'Mid the few ruins that attest thy reign,
Deplored the sinking hind, the desecrated plain.

Alas, sweet Auburn! since thy bard bewail'd
“Thy bowers, by Trade's unfeeling sons assail'd,”
How many a village, sweet like thee, hath seen
The once-bless'd cottage joyless on the green!
Now e'en “the last of all thy harmless train,
The sad historian of the pensive plain,”
Now “e'en that feeble, solitary thing”
Hath ceased “to bend above the plashy spring;”
And her fall'n children breathe their curses deep,
Far from that home of which they think and weep.
Where myriad chimneys wrap their dens in shade,
They rob the night to ply their sickly trade,
And weekly come, with subjugated soul,
Degraded, lost, to ask the workhouse dole.
Slow seems the gloomy Angel, slow, to bring
His opiate cold to hopeless suffering;
And, when in death's long sleep their eyes shall close,
Not with their fathers shall their dust repose,
By hoary playmates of their boyhood laid
Where never corse-thief plied his horrid trade:
Not in the village church-yard, lone and green,
Around their graves, shall weeping friends be seen;
But surly haste shall delve their shallow bed,
And hireling hands shall lay them with the dead,
Where chapmen bargain on the letter'd stone,
Or stumble, careless, o'er the frequent bone.

How long, O Love! shall loveless Avarice sow
Despair and sloth, and ask why curses grow?
Or dost thou give thy choicest gifts in vain,
And mock with seeming good the heir of pain?
God! where thy image dwells must sorrow dwell?
Must Famine make thy earth her hopeless hell?
Did thy uplifted axe, Napoleon, find,
In manless deserts, barren as the wind,
Food? or, when black depopulation shed
Hunger o'er Moscow, were Gaul's armies fed?
Why do the clouds cast fatness on the hills?
Why pours the mountain his unfailing rills?
Why teems with flowers the vale—with life the sky?
Why weds with loveliness utility?
Why woos the foodful plain, in blessing bless'd,
The sons of labour to her virgin breast?
Why is the transcript of thy Heav'n so fair,
If man, poor victim! lives but to despair?

O thou, whose brightening wing is plumed with light,
At once that pinion's beauty and its might—
Thou true Prometheus, by whose lore were taught
To fix on adamant the fleeting thought,
Star-ruling science, calculation strong,
The march of letters, and th' array of song!
Twin-born with Liberty, and child of Love,
Woe-conquering Knowledge! when wilt thou remove
Th' opprobium of the earth—the chain'd in soul?
When wilt thou make man's deadliest sickness whole?
Lo! while our “bearers of glad tidings” roam
To farthest lands, we pine in gloom at home!
And still, in thought, I hear one whirlwind past!
Still hurtles in my soul the dying blast,
The echo of a hell of sound, that jarr'd
The ear of Heav'n, as when his angels warr'd!
Terrific drama! and the actors men;
But such may shuddering earth ne'er see again!
Unlike her children, less than fiends or more!
And one, of scarcely human grandeur, bore
World-shaking thunder on his sightless wing;
But, when thy spear assail'd his brandish'd sting,
He waned to half a Cæsar. Him the frown
Of ruin dash'd beneath thy axle down;
Then horror shook him from his deathlike sleep;
Then vengeance cast him o'er the troubled deep;
And, on the winds of retribution hurl'd,
His demon-shadow still appals the world!
When, Knowledge, when will mortals learn thy lore?
They plant thy tree, and water it with gore.
When wilt thou—when thy power almighty prove,
And bind the sons of men in chains of Love?
Rise, hope of nations, and assuage their ills!
This wills thy Teacher—this thy Parent wills.
For this, Love taught thy childhood in her bower,
And bade thee syllable her words of power,
Till brighten'd on thy brow sublimest thought;
And she, thy teacher, wonder'd as she taught.
O rise and reign, bless'd Power, that lov'st to bless;
Queen of all worlds, best name of mightiness!
Thy book of life to Labour's children give:
Let Destitution learn to read, and live;
And Independence, smiling on thy brow,
Sing hymns to Love and Plenty, o'er the plough!
Thy kingdom come! on earth let discord cease;
Come thy long Sabbath of bless'd love and peace!
No more let Famine, from her idle hell,
Unwonted guest, with Love and Labour dwell,
Till death stares ghastly-wild in living eyes,
And at Pride's bloated feet his feeder dies,
While Luxury, hand in hand with Ruin, moves
To do the Devil's work, and call it Love's.
What whirlwind, in his dread magnificence,
What Samiel blasts, like hopeless indolence?
And man, when active most, and govern'd best,
Hath ills enough, insatiate to molest
His fragile peace—some strong in evil will,
But weak in act; and others arm'd to kill,
Or swift to wound;—Revenge, with venomous eyes;
Distrust, beneath whose frown affection dies;
Scorn, reptile Scorn, that hate's the eagle's wing;
Mean Envy's grubs, that stink, and long to sting;
Mischance, Disease, Detraction's coward dart,
And the long silence of the broken heart;
Nor only these. Tradition is the sigh
Of one who hath no hope; and history
Bears—like a river deep, tumultuous, wide—
Gloom, guilt, and woe, on his eternal tide.
Nor need we read of regal wrath and hate,
Troy lost by Love and army-scatt'ring Fate.
The humblest hamlet's annals wake a sigh;
And could yon cot, hoar with antiquity,
Relate what deeds within it have been done,
What hopeless suffering there hath cursed the sun,
The tale might draw down Pride's parch'd cheek severe,
From Power's hard eye, e'en Pluto's iron tear.