One sink of level avarice shall lie,
And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonour'd die.
Yet think not, thus when Freedom's ills I state, I mean to flatter kings, or court the great; Ye powers of truth, that bid my soul aspire, Far from my bosom drive the low desire; And thou, fair Freedom, taught alike to feel The rabble's rage, and tyrant's angry steel;
Thou transitory flower, alike undone
By proud contempt, or favour's fostering sun,
Still may thy blooms the changeful clime endure,
I only would repress them to secure :
For just experience tells, in every soil,
That those who think must govern those that toil;
And all that freedom's highest aims can reach,
Is but to lay proportion'd loads on each.
Hence, should one order disproportion'd grow,
Its double weight must ruin all below.
O then how blind to all that truth requires,
Who think it freedom when a part aspires!
Calm is my soul, nor apt to rise in arms,
Except when fast-approaching danger warms:
But when contending chiefs blockade the throne,
Contracting regal power to stretch their own,1
When I behold a factious band agree
To call it freedom when themselves are free;
Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw,
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law; 2
The wealth of climes, where savage nations roam,
Pillag'd from slaves to purchase slaves at home;
Fear, pity, justice, indignation start,
Tear off reserve, and bare my swelling heart;
Till half a patriot, half a coward grown,
I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.3
Cf. The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, i. 202 (ch. xix.).] [Ibid., i. 206 (ch. xix.).]
[Ibid., i. 201 (ch. xix.).]
Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour,
When first ambition struck at regal power;
And thus polluting honour in its source,
Gave wealth to sway the mind with double force.
Have we not seen, round Britain's peopled shore,1
Her useful sons exchanged for useless ore?
Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste,
Like flaring tapers brightening as they waste;
Seen opulence, her grandeur to maintain,
Lead stern depopulation in her train,
And over fields where scatter'd hamlets rose,
In barren solitary pomp repose?
Have we not seen at pleasure's lordly call,
The smiling long-frequented village fall?
Beheld the duteous son, the sire decay'd,
The modest matron, and the blushing maid,
Forc'd from their homes, a melancholy train,
To traverse climbs beyond the western main ;
Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around,
And Niagara stuns with thund'ring sound?
Even now, perhaps, as there some pilgrim strays
Through tangled forests, and through dangerous ways;
Where beasts with man divided empire claim,
And the brown Indian marks with murderous aim;
There, while above the giddy tempest flies,
And all around distressful yells arise,
The pensive exile, bending with his woe,
To stop too fearful, and too faint to go,2
Casts a long look where England's glories shine,
And bids his bosom sympathise with mine.
Vain, very vain, my weary search to find That bliss which only centres in the mind: Why have I stray'd from pleasure and repose, To seek a good each government bestows? In every government, though terrors reign, Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
[1 This and the lines that follow contain the germ of The Deserted Village.]
[Johnson contributed this line. (Birkbeck Hill's Boswell, 1887, ii. 6.)]
How small, of all that human hearts endure,1
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find:
With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
The lifted axe, the agonising wheel,
Luke's iron crown,2 and Damiens' bed of steel,
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience, all our own.
[Johnson wrote these last lines, the penultimate couplet excepted. (Boswell, ut supra.)]
12 George (not Luke) Dosa, a Hungarian patriot, suffered in 1514 the penalty of the red-hot iron crown. Cf. H. Morley's Montaigne, 1886, xvi.]
[Robert-François Damiens was executed in 1757 after horrible tortures for an attempt to assassinate Louis XV. When in the Conciergerie, he is said to have been chained to an iron bed. (Smollett's History of England, 1823, bk. iii. ch. 7, § xxv.).]
|