| |
| WHERE stretch’d your sail, beneath what foreign sky | |
| Did lovelier landscape ever charm your eye? | |
| Could fancy’s fairy pencil, stranger! say, | |
| E’en dipt in dreams, a nobler scene pourtray? | |
| |
| Behold yon vales, whose skirts elude your view, | 5 |
| And mountains fading to aerial blue! | |
| Along their bowery shades how healthy toil | |
| Alternate sports, or tends the mellow soil. | |
| See rural towns ’mid groves and gardens rise, | |
| And eastward,—where the stretching ocean lies, | 10 |
| Lo! our fair capital sublimes the scene, | |
| New Albion’s pride, and ocean’s future queen; | |
| How o’er the tradeful port august she smiles,— | |
| Her sea-like haven boasts an hundred isles, | |
| When hardy commerce swell the lofty sails | 15 |
| O’er arctic seas, and mocks the polar gales; | |
| Thence tides of wealth the wafting breezes bring, | |
| And hence e’en culture feels its vital spring. | |
| |
| These scenes our sires from rugged nature wrought, | |
| Since—what dire wars their patriot race have fought! | 20 |
| Witness yon tract, where first the Briton bled, | |
| Driven by our youth redoubted Percy fled: | |
| There Breed ascends, and Bunker’s bleeding steeps, | |
| Still o’er whose brow abortive victory weeps; | |
| What trophies since! the gaze of after times, | 25 |
| Rear’d freedom’s empire o’er our happy climes! | |
| |
| But hence, fond stranger, take a nobler view, | |
| See yon shorn elm, 1 whence all these glories grew. | |
| Here, where the armed foe presumptuous trod, | |
| Trampled our shrines, and even mouth’d our God, | 30 |
| His vengeful hand, deep as the parent root, | |
| Lopt each grown branch, and every suckling shoot; | |
| Because beneath her consecrated shade | |
| Our earliest vows to liberty were paid. | |
| High from her altar blew the heaven-caught fire, | 35 |
| While all our wealth o’erhung the kindling pyre. | |
| How at the deed the nations stood aghast, | |
| As on the pile our plighted lives we cast! | |
| |
| O! if an alien from our fair domains, | |
| The blood of Britain, hapless, taint your veins, | 40 |
| Pace o’er that hallow’d ground with awful tread, | |
| And tears, atoning, o’er yon relic shed; | |
| But if, American! your lineage springs, | |
| From sires, who scorn the pedigree of kings, | |
| A Georgian born, you breathe the tepid air, | 45 |
| Or on the breezy banks of Delaware, | |
| Or hardy Hampshire claim your haughty birth, | |
| Revere yon root, and kiss its nurturing earth: | |
| O be its fibres fed by flowing springs, | |
| Whence rose our empire o’er the thrones of kings: | 50 |
| E’en now descend, adore the dear remain, | |
| Where first rear’d liberty’s illumin’d fane. | |
| There all her race, while time revolves, shall come, | |
| As pilgrims flock to Mecca’s idol’d tomb. | |
