SENT WITH A COPY OF THE AUTHOR'S POEMS
SINCE there is magic in your look
And in your voice a witching charm,
As all our hearts consenting tell,
Enchantress, smile upon my book,
And guard its lays from hate and harm
By beauty's most resistless spell.
The sunny dew-drop of thy praise,
Young day-star of the rising time,
Shall with its odoriferous morn
Refresh my sere and wither'd bays.
Smile, and I will believe my rhyme
Shall please the beautiful unborn.
Go forth, my pictured thoughts, and rise
In traits and tints of sweeter tone,
When Julia's glance is o'er ye flung;
Glow, gladden, linger in her eyes,
And catch a magic not your own,
Read by the music of her tongue.
SWEET Iser! were thy sunny realm
And flowery gardens mine,
Thy waters I would shade with elm
To prop the tender vine;
My golden flagons I would fill
With rosy draughts from every hill;
And under every myrtle bower,
My gay companions should prolong
The laugh, the revel, and the song,
To many an idle hour.
Like rivers crimson'd with the beam
Of yonder planet bright,
Our balmy cups should ever stream
Profusion of delight ;
No care should touch the mellow heart,
And sad or sober none depart ;
For wine can triumph over woe,
And Love and Bacchus, brother powers,
Could build in Iser's sunny bowers
A paradise below.
ON THE DEPARTURE OF EMIGRANTS FOR NEW
ON England's shore I saw a pensive band,
With sails unfurl'd for earth's remotest strand,
Like children parting from a mother, shed
Tears for the home that could not yield them
bread;
Grief mark'd each face receding from the view, 'Twas grief to nature honourably true.
And long, poor wanderers o'er the ecliptic deep, The song that names but home shall make you
Oft shall ye fold your flocks by stars above
In that far world, and miss the stars ye love;
Oft when its tuneless birds scream round forlorn,
Regret the lark that gladdens England's morn,
And, giving England's names to distant scenes,
Lament that earth's extension intervenes.
But cloud not yet too long, industrious train,
Your solid good with sorrow nursed in vain :
For has the heart no interest yet as bland
As that which binds us to our native land?
The deep-drawn wish, when children crown our
To hear the cherub-chorus of their mirth,
Undamp'd by dread that want may e'er unhouse,
Or servile misery knit those smiling brows :
The pride to rear an independent shed,
And give the lips we love unborrow'd bread:
To see a world, from shadowy forests won,
In youthful beauty wedded to the sun;
To skirt our home with harvests widely sown,
And call the blooming landscape all our own,
Our children's heritage, in prospect long.
These are the hopes, high-minded hopes and
That beckon England's wanderers o'er the brine, To realms where foreign constellations shine; Where streams from undiscover'd fountains roll, And winds shall fan them from th' Antarctic
And what though doom'd to shores so far apart From England's home, that ev'n the homesick
Quails, thinking, ere that gulf can be recross'd,
How large a space of fleeting life is lost:
Yet there, by time, their bosoms shall be changed,
And strangers once shall cease to sigh estranged,
But jocund in the year's long sunshine roam,
That yields their sickle twice its harvest-home.
There, marking o'er his farm's expanding ring
New fleeces whiten and new fruits upspring,
The gray-hair'd swain, his grandchild sporting
Shall walk at eve his little empire's bound,
Emblazed with ruby vintage, ripening corn,
And verdant rampart of acacian thorn,
While, mingling with the scent his pipe exhales, The orange grove's and fig-tree's breath prevails;
Survey with pride beyond a monarch's spoil,
His honest arm's own subjugated soil;
And, summing all the blessings God has given,
Put up his patriarchal prayer to Heaven,
That, when his bones shall here repose in peace,
The scions of his love may still increase,
And o'er a land where life has ample room,
In health and plenty innocently bloom.
Delightful land, in wildness ev'n benign,
The glorious past is ours, the future thine!
As in a cradled Hercules, we trace
The lines of empire in thine infant face.
What nations in thy wide horizon's span
Shall teem on tracts untrodden yet by man!
What spacious cities with their spires shall gleam,
Where now the panther laps a lonely stream,
And all but brute or reptile life is dumb!
Land of the free! thy kingdom is to come,
Of states, with laws from Gothic bondage burst,
And creeds by charter'd priesthoods unaccurst:
Of navies, hoisting their emblazon'd flags,
Where shipless seas now wash unbeacon'd crags
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