On high the soldier hangs his shield;
The seaman there has furled his sail,
Long rent by many an adverse gale.
Remembered perils, braved and past, —
The raging fight, the whelming blast,
The hidden rock, the stormy shore,
The mountain-breaker’s deepening roar, —
Recalled by fancy’s spell divine,
Endear their evening’s calm decline,
And teach their children, listening near,
To emulate their sires’ career.
But swiftly urge the gliding bark,
By yon stern walls and chambers dark,
Where guilt and woe, in night concealed,
Unthought, unwitnessed, unrevealed,
Through lengthened ages scowling stood,
Mid shrieks of death, and tears of blood.
No heart may think, no tongue declare,
The fearful mysteries hidden there:
Justice averts her trembling eye,
And mercy weeps, and hastens by.
Long has the tempest’s rage been spent
On yon unshaken battlement,
Memorial proud of days sublime,
Whose splendor mocks the power of time.
There, when the distant war-storm roared,
While patriot thousands round her poured,
The British heroine grasped her sword,
To trace the paths of victory
But in the rage of naval fight,
The island-genius reared his might,
And stamped, in characters of light.
His own immortal destiny.
Ascending dark, on uplands brown,
The ivied walls of Hadleigh frown:
High on the lonely mouldering tower
Forms of departed ages lower.
But deeper, broader, louder, glide
The waves of the descending tide;
And soon, where winds unfettered roar,
Where Medway seeks the opening Nore
Where breakers lash the dark-red steep,
The barks of Britain stem the deep.
Oh king of streams! when, wandering slow,
I trace thy current’s ceaseless flow,
And mark, with venerating gaze,
Reflected on thy liquid breast,
The monuments of ancient days,
Where sages, bards, and statesmen rest:
Who, waking erst the ethereal mind,
Instructed, charmed, and blessed mankind
The rays of fancy pierce the gloom
That shrouds the precincts of the tomb,
And call again to life and light
The forms long wrapped in central night.
From abbies grey and castles old,
Through mouldering portals backward rolled,
Glide dimly forth, with silent tread,
The shades of the illustrious dead.
Still dear to them their native shore,
The woods and fields they loved of yore;
And still, by farthest realms revered,
Subsists the rock-built tower they reared,
Though lightnings round its summit glow,
And foaming surges burst below.
Thames I have roamed, at evening hours,
Near beauteous Richmond’s courtly bowers,
When, mild and pale, the moon-beams fell
On hill and islet, grove and dell;
And many a skiff, with fleecy sail
Expanded to the western gale,
Traced on thy breast, serenely-bright,
The lengthening line of silver light;
And many an oar, with measured dash
Accordant to the boatman’s song,
Bade thy pellucid surface flash,
And whirl, in glittering rings, along;
While from the broad and dripping blade
The clear drops fell, in sparkling showers,
Bright as the crystal gems, displayed
In Amphitrite’s coral bowers.
There beauty wooed the breeze of night,
Beneath the silken canopy,
And touched, with flying fingers light,
The thrilling chords of melody.
It seemed, that music’s inmost soul
Was breathed upon the wandering airs,
Charming to rest, with sweet control,
All human passions, pains, and cares.
Enthusiast voices joined the sound,
And poured such soothing strains around
That well might ardent fancy deem,
The sylphs had led their viewless band,
To warble o’er the lovely stream
The sweetest songs of fairyland.
Now, breathing wild, with raptured swell,
They floated o’er the silent tide;
Now, soft and low, the accents fell,
And, seeming mystic tales to tell,
In heavenly murmurs died.
Yet that sweet scene of pensive joy
Gave mournful recollections birth,
And called to fancy’s wild employ
The certain destinies of earth.
I seemed to hear, in wakening thought,
While those wild minstrel accents rung,
Whate’er historic truth had taught,
Or philosophic bards had sung.
Methought a voice, severe and strange,
Whispered of fate, and time, and change,
And bade my wandering mind recall,
How nations rise, and fade, and fall.
Thus fair, of old, Euphrates rolled,
By Babylon’s imperial site:
The lute’s soft swell, with magic spell,
Breathed rapture on the listening night:
Love-whispering youths and maidens fair
In festal pomp assembled there,
Where to the stream’s responsive moan
The desert-gale now sighs alone.
Still changeless, through the fertile plain,
Araxes, loud-resounding, flows,
Where gorgeous despots fixed their reign,
And Chil-minar’s proud domes arose.
High on his gem-emblazoned throne
Sate kneeling Persia’s earthly god:
Fair slaves and satraps round him shone,
And nations trembled at his nod:
The mighty voice of Asia’s fate
Went forth from every golden gate.
Now pensive steps the wrecks explore,
That skirt the solitary shore:
The time-worn column mouldering falls,
And tempests rock the roofless walls.
Perchance, when many a distant year,
Urged by the hand of fate, has flown,
Where moonbeams rest on ruins drear,
The musing sage may rove alone;
And many an awful thought sublime
May fill his soul, when memory shews,
That there, in days of elder time,
The world’s metropolis arose;
Where now, by mouldering walls, he sees
The silent Thames unheeded flow,
And only hears the river-breeze,
Through reeds and willows whispering low.
Where are the states of ancient fame ?
Athens, and Sparta’s victor- name,
And all that propped, in war and peace,
The arms, and nobler arts, of Greece ?
All-grasping Rome, that proudly hurled
Her mandates o’er the prostrate world,
Long heard mankind her chains deplore,
And fell, as Carthage fell before.
Is this the crown, the final meed,
To man’s sublimest toils decreed ?
Must all, from glory’s radiant height,
Descend alike the paths of night ?
Must she, whose voice of power resounds
On utmost ocean’s loneliest bounds,
In darkness meet the whelming doom
&nb
sp; That crushed the sovereign strength of Rome,
And o’er the proudest states of old
The storms of desolation rolled ?
Time, the foe of man’s dominion,
Wheels around in ceaseless flight,
Scattering from his hoary pinion
Shades of everlasting night.
Still, beneath his frown appalling,
Man and all his works decay
Still, before him, swiftly-falling,
Kings and kingdoms pass away.
Cannot the hand of patriot zeal,
The heart that seeks the public weal,
The comprehensive mind,
Retard awhile the storms of fate,
That, swift or slow, or soon or late,
Shall hurl to ruin every state,
And leave no trace behind ?
Oh Britain! oh my native land!
To science, art, and freedom dear!
Whose sails o’er farthest seas expand,
And brave the tempest’s dread career!
When comes that hour, as come it must,
That sinks thy glory in the dust,
May no degenerate Briton live,
Beneath a stranger’s chain to toil,
And to a haughty conqueror give
The produce of thy sacred soil!
Oh! dwells there one, on all thy plains,
If British blood distend his veins,
Who would not burn thy fame to save,
Or perish in his country’s grave ?
Ah! sure, if skill and courage true
Can check destruction’s headlong way,
Still shall thy power its course pursue,
Nor sink, but with the world’s decay.
Long as the cliff that girds thine isle
The bursting surf of ocean stems,
Shall commerce, wealth, and plenty smile
Along the silver-eddying Thames:
Still shall thine empire’s fabric stand,
Admired and feared from land to land,
Through every circling age renewed,
Unchanged, unshaken, unsubdued;
As rocks resist the wildest breeze,
That sweeps thy tributary seas.
STANZAS, WRITTEN AT SEA.
[Published in 1812.]
I.
THOU white-rolling ‘sea! from thy foam-crested billows,
That restlessly flash in the silver moon-beam,
In fancy I turn to the green-waving willows,
That rise by the side of my dear native stream.
There softly in moonlight soft waters are playing,
Which light-breathing zephyrs symphoniously sweep;
While here the loud wings of the north-wind are swaying,
And whirl the white spray of the wild-dashing deep.
II.
Sweet scenes of my childhood! with tender emotion,
Blind memory, still wakeful, your semblance portrays:
And I sigh, as I turn from the wide-beating ocean
To the paths where I roamed in my infantine days.
In fancy before me the pine-boughs are waving,
Beneath whose deep canopy musing I strayed;
In crystalline waters their image is laving,
And the friends of my bosom repose in their shade.
III.
Ye fair-spreading fields, which fertility blesses!
Ye rivers, that murmur with musical chime!
Ye groves of dark pine, in whoso sacred recesses
The nymph of romance holds her vigils sublime!
Ye heath-mantled hills, in lone wildness ascending!
Ye valleys, true mansions of peace and repose!
Ever green be your shades, nature’s children defending,
Where liberty sweetens what labour bestows.
IV.
Oh blest, trebly blest, is the peasant’s condition!
From courts and from cities reclining afar,
He hears not the summons of senseless ambition,
The tempests of ocean, and tumults of war.
Round the standard of battle though thousands may rally
When the trumpet of glory is pealing aloud,
He dwells in the shade of his own native valley,
And turns the same earth which his forefathers ploughed.
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES. PART I.
THE moonlight rests, with solemn smile,
On sylvan shore and willowy isle:
While Thames, beneath the imaged beam,
Rolls on his deep and silent stream.
The wasting wind of autumn sighs:
The oak’s discolored foliage flies
The grove, in deeper shadow cast,
Waves darkly in the eddying blast.
All hail, ye breezes, loud and drear,
That peal the death-song of the year!
Your rustling pinions waft around
A voice, that breathes no mortal sound,
And in mysterious accents sings
The flight of time, the change of things.
The seasons pass, in swift career:
Storms close, and zephyrs wake, the year:
The streams roll on, nor e’er return
To fill again their parent urn;
But bounteous nature, kindly-wise,
Their everlasting flow supplies.
Like planets round the central sun,
The rapid wheels of being run,
By laws, from earliest time pursued,
Still changed, still wasted, still renewed.
Reflected in the present scene,
Return the forms that once have been
The present’s varying tints display
The colors of the future day.
By laws, from earliest time pursued,
Still changed, still wasted, still renewed.
Reflected in the present scene,
Return the forms that once have been:
The present’s varying tints display
The colors of the future day.
Ye bards, that, in these secret shades,
These tufted woods, and sloping glades,
Awoke, to charm the sylvan maids,
Your soul-entrancing minstrelsy!
Say, do your spirits yet delight
To rove, beneath the starry night,
Along this water’s margin bright,
Or mid the woodland scenery;
And strike, to notes of tender fire,
With viewless hands, the shadowy lyre,
Till all the wandering winds respire
A wildly-awful symphony?
Hark! from beneath the aged spray,
Where hangs my humbler lyre on high,
Soft music fills the woodlands grey,
And notes aerial warble by!
What flying touch, with elfin spell,
Bids its responsive numbers swell?
Whence is the deep Æolian strain,
That on the wind its changes flings ?
Returns some ancient hard again,
To wake to life the slumbering strings ?
Or breathed the spirit of the scene
The lightly-trembling chords between,
Diffusing his benignant power
On twilight’s consecrated hour
Even now, methinks, in solemn guise,
By yonder willowy islet grey,
I see thee, sedge-crowned Genius! rise,
And point the glories of thy way.
Tall reeds around thy temples play
Thy hair the liquid crystal gems:
To thee I pour the votive lay,
Oh Genius of the silver Thames!
The shepherd-youth, on Yarrow braes,
Of Yarrow stream has sung the praise,
To love and beauty dear:
And long shall Yarrow roll in fame,
Charm with the magic of a name,
And claim the tender tear.
Who has not wept, in pastoral lay
&
nbsp; To hear the maiden’s song of woe,
Who mourned her lover snatched away,
And plunged the sounding surge below ?
The maid, who never ceased to weep,
And tell the winds her tale of sorrow,
Till on his breast she sunk to sleep,
Beneath the lonely waves of Yarrow.
The minstrel oft, at evening-fall,
Has leaned on Roxburgh’s ruined wall,
Where, on the wreck of grandeur past,
The wild wood braves the sweeping blast:
And while, beneath the embowering shade,
Swelled, loud and deep, his notes of flame,
Has called the spirits of the glade,
To hear the voice of Teviot’s fame.
While artless love, and spotless truth,
Delight the waking dreams of youth;
While nature’s beauties, softly-wild,
Are dear to nature’s wandering child;
The lyre shall ring, where sparkling Tweed,
By red-stone cliff, and broom-flowered mead,
And ivied walls in fair decay,
Resounds along his rock-strown way.
There oft the bard, at midnight still,
When rove his eerie steps alone,
Shall start to hear, from haunted hill,
The bugle-blast at distance blown:
And oft his raptured eye shall trace,
Amid the visionary gloom,
The foaming courser’s eager pace,
The mail-clad warrior’s crimson plume,
The beacons, blazing broad and far,
The lawless marchmen ranging free,
And all the pride of feudal war,
And pomp of border chivalry.
And Avon too has claimed the lay,
Whose listening wave forgot to stray,
By Shakespeare’s infant reed restrained:
And Severn, whose suspended swell
Felt the dread weight of Merlin’s spell,
When the lone spirits of the dell
Of Arthur’s fall complained.
And sweetly winds romantic Dee,
And Wye’s fair banks all lovely smiles:
But all, oh Thames! submit to thee,
The monarch-stream of Albion’s isle.
From some ethereal throne on high,
Where clouds in nectar-dews dissolve,
The muse shall mark, with eagle-eye,
The world’s diminished orb revolve.
At once her ardent glance shall roll,
From clime to clime, from pole to pole,
O’er waters, curled by zephyr’s wing,
O’er shoreless seas, by whirlwinds tost;
O’er vallies of perennial spring,
And wastes of everlasting frost;
O’er deserts, where the Siroc raves,
And heaves the sand in fiery waves;
O’er caverns of mysterious gloom;
O’er lakes, where peaceful islets bloom,
Like emerald spots, serenely-bright,
Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock Page 127