Good Kosciusko, thy great name alone
Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling;
It comes upon us like the glorious pealing
Of the wide spheres — an everlasting tone.
And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown,
The names of heroes, burst from clouds concealing,
And changed to harmonies, for ever stealing
Through cloudless blue, and round each silver throne.
It tells me too, that on a happy day,
When some good spirit walks upon the earth,
Thy name with Alfred’s, and the great of yore
Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth
To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away
To where the great God lives for evermore.
Happy is England! I Could Be Content
Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.
Lines Written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns’s Country
There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain,
Where patriot battle has been fought, where glory had the gain;
There is a pleasure on the heath where druids old have been,
Where mantles grey have rustled by and swept the nettles green;
There is a joy in every spot made known by times of old,
New to the feet, although each tale a hundred times be told;
There is a deeper joy than all, more solemn in the heart,
More parching to the tongue than all, of more divine a smart,
When weary steps forget themselves upon a pleasant turf,
Upon hot sand, or flinty road, or seashore iron scurf, Toward the castle or the cot, where long ago was born
One who was great through mortal days, and died of fame unshorn,
Light heather-bells may tremble then, but they are far away;
Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern, - the sun may hear his lay;
Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,
But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;
Blood-red the sun may set behind black mountain peaks;
Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks;
Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air;
Ring-doves may fly convuls’d across to some high-cedar’d lair; But the forgotten eye is still fast lidded to the ground,
As Palmer’s, that with weariness, mid-desert shrine hath found.
At such a time the soul’s a child, in childhood is the brain;
Forgotten is the worldly heart - alone, it beats in vain. -
Aye, if a madman could have leave to pass a healthful day
To tell his forehead’s swoon and faint when first began decay,
He might make tremble many a one whose spirit had gone forth
To find a Bard’s low cradle-place about the silent North!
Scanty the hour and few the steps beyond the bourn of care,
Beyond the sweet and bitter world, - beyond it unaware! Scanty the hour and few the steps, because a longer stay
Would bar return, and make a man forget his mortal way:
O horrible! to lose the sight of well remember’d face,
Of Brother’s eyes, of Sister’s brow - constant to every place;
Filling the air, as on we move, with portraiture intense;
More warm than those heroic tints that pain a painter’s sense,
When shapes of old come striding by, and visages of old,
Locks shining black, hair scanty grey, and passions manifold.
No, no, that horror cannot be, for at the cable’s length
Man feels the gentle anchor pull and gladdens in its strength: One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall.
But in the very next he reads his soul’s memorial: -
He reads it on the mountain’s height, where chance he
may sit down
Upon rough marble diadem - that hill’s eternal crown.
Yet be his anchor e’er so fast, room is there for a prayer
That man may never lose his mind on mountains black and bare;
That he may stray league after league some great birth place to find
And keep his vision
