FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   >>  
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 hearth, 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 strong. That beckon England's wanderers o'er the brine, To realms where foreign constellations shine; Where streams from undiscovered fountains roll, And winds shall fan them from th' Antarctic pole. And what though doom'd to shores so far apart From England's home, that ev'n the home-sick heart 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 grey-haired swain, his grandchild sporting round, 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.
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   >>  



Top keywords:

empire

 

England

 

children

 

mingling

 
rampart
 

ripening

 

vintage

 

verdant

 

Emblazed

 

Acacian


sickle

 

yields

 

harvest

 
sunshine
 
strangers
 
jocund
 

estranged

 

marking

 

haired

 

grandchild


sporting

 

upspring

 

fruits

 
expanding
 

fleeces

 

whiten

 
future
 
cradled
 

Hercules

 
glorious

benign
 

plenty

 
health
 

innocently

 
wildness
 

Delightful

 

infant

 
untrodden
 

spacious

 

cities


spires

 
tracts
 

nations

 

horizon

 
monarch
 

honest

 

changed

 

subjugated

 
Survey
 

orange