LINES TO JULIA M—. SENT WITH A COPY OF THE AUTHOR'S POEMS. SINCE there is magic in your look The sunny dew-drop of thy praise, Go forth, my pictured thoughts, and rise DRINKING SONG OF MUNICH, SWEET Iser! were thy sunny realm My golden flagons I would fill With rosy draughts from every hill; Like rivers crimson'd with the beam Our balmy cups should ever stream No care should touch the mellow heart, For wine can triumph over woe, And Love and Bacchus, brother powers, Could build in Iser's sunny bowers ON England's shore I saw a pensive band, Tears for the home that could not yield them bread; 'Twas grief to nature honourably true. And long, poor wanderers o'er the ecliptic deep, In that far world, and miss the stars ye love; And, giving England's names to distant scenes, 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 undiscover'd 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, While, mingling with the scent his pipe exhales, peace, 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, Where now the panther laps a lonely stream, And all but brute or reptile life is dumb! Land of the free! thy kingdom is to come, |