BRITAIN! we cite you to our bar, once more; | |
| What but ambition urged you to our shore?— | |
| To abridge our native rights, seven years you strove; | |
| Seven years were ours your arm of death to prove, | |
| To find, that conquest was your sovereign view; | 5 |
| Your aims, to fetter, humble, and subdue, | |
| To seize a soil which not your labour till’d | |
| When the rude native scarcely we repell’d. | |
| When, with unbounded rage, their nations swore | |
| To hurl the out-law’d stranger from their shore, | 10 |
| Or swell the torrent with their thousands slain. | |
| No more to approach them, or molest their reign.— | |
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| What did we ask?—what right but reason owns? | |
| Yet even the mild petition met your frowns. | |
| Submission only to a monarch’s will | 15 |
| Could calm your rage, or bid your storm be still. | |
| |
| Before our eyes the angry shades appear | |
| Of those, whose relics we this day inter: | |
| They live, they speak, reproach you, and complain | |
| Their lives were shorten’d by your galling chain: | 20 |
| They aim their shafts, directed to your breast,— | |
| Let rage, and fierce resentment tell the rest. | |
| |
| These coffins, tokens of our last regard | |
| These mouldering bones your vengeance might have spared.— | |
| If once, in life, they met you on the main, | 25 |
| If to your arms they yielded on the plain,— | |
| Man, once a captive, all respect should claim | |
| That Britain gave, before her days of shame. | |
| How changed their lot! in floating dungeons thrown, | |
| They sigh’d unpitied, and relieved by none: | 30 |
| In want of all that nature’s wants demand, | |
| They met destruction from some traitor’s hand, | |
| Who treated all with death or poison here, | |
| Or the last groan, with ridicule severe. | |
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| A sickening languor to the soul returns | 35 |
| And kindling passion at the motive spurns: | |
| The murders here, did we at length display | |
| Would more than paint an Indian tyrant’s sway: | |
| Then hush the theme, and to the dust restore | |
| These, once so wretched near Manhattan’s shore. | 40 |
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