Woolwich--Woolwich,
The Thames is thy ditch,
And stout hearts are thy fortification.
Let come who come may,
All is open as day,
Thy gates are as free as thy nation.
Let the King of the French
Build wall, or dig trench,
Though he has no more princes to marry,
_Our_ trench is the sea,
And _our_ walls are the free,
And we laugh at thy "_grande enceinte, Paris._"
Deep and dark on their quay,
Like lions at bay,
Stand the guns that set earth at defiance;
With mountains of ball,
Which, wherever they fall,
With their message make speedy compliance.
Along the Parade
Lies the brisk carronade,
With Wellington's joy, the twelve-pounder.
And the long sixty-eight,
Made for matters of weight,
The world has no arguments sounder.
There stands the long rocket,
That shot, from its socket,
Puts armies, pell-mell, to the rout, sir;
At Leipsic, its tail
Made Napoleon turn pale,
And sent all his _braves_ right about, sir.
And there gapes the mortar,
That seldom gives quarter,
When speaking to ship or to city;
For, although deaf and dumb,
Its tongue is a bomb--
And so, there's an end of my ditty.
The sun had now overcome the mists of the morning, and was throwing a
rich lustre over the long sheets of foliage which screened, but without
concealing, a large and classic villa on the Essex side. The park
reached to the water's edge, in broad vistas, green as the emerald; deer
were moving in groups over the lawn, or on standing still to gaze on the
wonder of our flying ship. A few boats were slowly passing near the
shore, along with the tide; the water was without a ripple,--the air was
soft and fragrant, as it flowed from grove and garden; and the whole was
a scene of sylvan and summer beauty. The thought suddenly shot across my
mind, what a capital prize this would be, in a revolution! How
handsomely it would repay a patriot for his trouble in uprooting lords
and commons! What a philosophic consummation of a life of husting
harangues, and league itinerancy, it would be, to lie on the
drawing-room sofa of a mansion so perfectly Greek, railing at the
tyranny of thrones, the bigotry of bishops, and the avarice of
aristocracies; lamenting the privations of the poor, over a table of
three courses, and drinking confusion to all monopolies in _Vin de
Comete!_
But, who was the present possessor? I asked the name and heard it. But,
from the captain to the cabin-boy, not a soul could give me another
syllable of information. Like the gravedigger in Hamlet, they might
"cudgel their brains," but all came to the gravedigger's confession at
last,--"Mass, I cannot tell."
Such, thought I, are the chances of the world. The owner of this marine
palace,--of these gardens, groves, deer, and dovecotes,--cannot have
less than L10,000 a-year; yet his name has never reached the auricular
sensibilities of man, beyond the fence of his own park. Was he
philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, historian? inventor of
steam-engine, of spinning jenny, of gunpowder, or of gun-cotton? No, I
searched every cell of memory for some "trivial fond record" which might
justify his title to a mansion and grounds fit for Sophocles, Schiller,
or Shakspeare, the master of them all. I could not find, in all the
rolls of the court of reminiscences, a single scrape of the pen to
inform me; not so much as the commemorative smoke of a candle on the
ceiling of the alcove of Mnemosyne; not a vestige of the "light
fantastic toe," of those sylphs who treasure the flippancies of noble
pens, and live in the fragrance of albums, otto-perfumed. Still I was
driven to the confession, "Mass, I cannot tell."
I had brought a volume of poor Tom Campbell in my pocket, and had been
glancing over his _chef-d'oeuvre_, "Ye Mariners of England," when this
stately edifice first checked my inspiration. In the wrath of my spirit
I tossed the volume overboard. "Psha!" I involuntarily exclaimed, "what
is the use of being a genius? What is the gratitude of a country, where
a cotton-spinner can purchase the fee-simple of a province, while the
man who spreads its fame over the world is left to gather his
contemplations over a stove in an attic, watch the visage of his
landlady, and shudder at the rise of coals!
'England, with all thy faults I love thee still.'
But it must be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry,
beggarly, blind--" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole
magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen
region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and
the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers--is exactly L1200 a-year! and this
to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of
the sons and daughters of the muse,--the whole "school of the prophets,"
the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! L1200 a-year for
the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes
by the generation to come. L1200 a-year, the salary of an Excise
commissioner, of a manipulator of the penny post, of a charity
inspector, of a police magistrate, of a register of cabs, of any thing
and every body: and this, reduced to decimals, is to be the national
prize, the luxurious provision, the brilliant prospect, the illustrious
tribute of a treasury of fifty millions sterling a-year, to the whole
literature of a land which boasts of its being the intellectual leader
of the world!
I have found the poems of our living bards on the shores of Hudson's
Bay, and heard men talking of them round a stove, while the thermometer
outside the window was 30 deg. below zero. I have found them in a
plantain-thatched hovel on the banks of the Niger, and forgotten while I
read them that the thermometer was 110 deg. in the shade. I have found them
in the hands of a learned pundit on the banks of the Ganges, whom they
were seducing into dreams of dewy pastures and crystal rills. And one of
the pleasantest evenings I ever remember to have spent, was, by the help
of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," as I sat at a supper of rice milk,
after a day of fire on the eastern branch of the Nile, a thousand miles
above Tourists, sheltered under the wagon of a Moorish ambassador from
Sultaun Abderahman to the monarch of Gondar. "England!" exclaimed this
ebony-visaged worshipper of the Beaux Arts, as he displayed the volume
before me. It was the only civilised word in his vocabulary. But I felt
the compliment with patriotic fervency, and in spirit thanked the bard
for the barbarian's acknowledgment of my poetic and penurious country.
I have not done with the theme yet. On returning from the equator, I saw
Campbell's funeral. Westminster Abbey was a mob of dukes, statesmen,
privy-councillors, and men of countless acres. Poor Tom's whole life had
been thankless toil; wasting in meagre industry the powers which ought
to have been cherished by his country for purposes of national honour.
Such is always the course of things. The very stones of Burns' pillars
would have made the great poet happy for life, if their price had been
given to him to cheer his melancholy fireside. Why has the poetic spirit
of England folded its wings, and been content to abandon its brilliant
region to the butterflies of albums, but that the spirit of England has
suffered itself to be fettered by the red tape of a peddling parsimony?
Should we have had a Shakspeare without the smiles of an Elizabeth, and
the generosity of a Southampton? No. He would have split his pen after
his first tragedy; have thrown his ink-stand into the Thames; have taken
the carrier's cart to Stratford, and there finished his days in writing
epitaphs in the churchyard, laughing at Sir Thomas Lucy, and bequeathing
deathless scoffs, to the beggary of mankind.
I was growing into what the dramatists call a "towering passion," and
meditating general reforms of Civil Lists, Chancellors of the Exchequer,
and Lord Chamberlains, when my attention was turned to a very animated
scene going on between a pair who seemed perfectly unconscious of all
the external creation. One of the parties was a showy-looking fellow,
with the mingled expression of _roueism_ and half-pay, which is so
frequent and so unmistakeable in the neighbourhood of St James's. The
lady was a calm and composed personage, whom, on a second glance, I
remembered to have seen wherever the world could bow down to the fair
possessor of countless "consols." But the passion for a handsome
mansion, a handsome stud, and a handsome rental, is indefatigable, and
the ex-staff man poured his adorations into her ear with all the glow of
a suitor ten thousand pounds worse than nothing.
Poesy! sweetest of all the maids of Parnassus! it is thou that givest
thy votary power to read the soul: it is thou that canst translate the
glance into a speech, and give eloquence to the clasp of a hand. It is
thou alone to whom the world is indebted for this _true_ version of the
pleadings of the Guardsman.