to welcome in
The white-wing'd Peace he warr'd to win!

Then, to that so long wish'd repose!
The liberal leisure of the farm,
The garden joy, the wild-wood charm;
Life ebbing to its perfect close
Like some white altar-lamp that pales
And self-consumed its light exhales.

No wrathful tempest smote its wing
Against life's tender flickering flame;
No tropic gloom in terror came;
Slow waning as a summer-spring
The soul breathed out herself, and slept,
And to the end her beauty kept.

Then, as a mother's love and fears
Throng round the child, unseen but felt,
So by his couch his nation knelt,
Loving and worshipping with her tears:--
Tears!--late amends for all that debt
Due to the Liberator yet!

For though the years their golden round
O'er all the lavish region roll,
And realm on realm, from pole to pole,
In one beneath thy stars be bound:
The far-off centuries as they flow,
No whiter name than this shall know!

--O larger England o'er the wave,
Larger, not greater, yet!--With joy
Of generous hearts ye hail'd the Boy
Who bow'd before the sacred grave,
With Love's fair freight across the sea
Sped from the Fatherland to thee!

And Freedom on that Empire-throne
Blest in his Mother's rule revered,
On popular love a kingdom rear'd,
And rooted in the years unknown,--
Land rich in old Experience' store
And holy legacies of yore,

And youth eternal, ever-new,--
From the high heaven look'd out:--and saw
This other later realm of Law,
Of that old household first-born true,
And lord of half a world!--and smiled
Upon the nations reconciled.

The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to
the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most
distinguished of his hosts said, 'an unwritten treaty of amity and
alliance.'

Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral, was the family seat
of Augustine, father to George Washington, and the residence of the
latter from 1752. But all his early years also had been spent in that
neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed his ideal of life:
and thither, on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he
retired in 1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with all the
strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman of Vergil's type. And there
(Dec. 1799) was he buried.

_Not eager_; When the ill-feeling between England and America deepened
after 1765, Washington 'was less eager than some others in declari