_On the Passage from Bengal to England._
For ease the harassed seaman prays,
When equinoctial tempests raise
The Cape’s surrounding wave;
When hanging o’er the reef he hears
The cracking mast, and sees or fears,
Beneath, his watery grave.
For ease the slow _Mahratta_ spoils
And hardier _Sic_ erratic toils,
While both their ease forego;
For ease, which neither gold can buy,
Nor robes, nor gems, which oft belie
The covered heart, bestow;
For neither gold nor gems combined
Can heal the soul, or suffering mind:
Lo! where their owner lies;
Perched on his couch distemper breathes
And care, like smoke, in turbid wreathes
Round the gay ceiling flies.
He who enjoys, nor covets more,
The lands his father held before,
Is of true bliss possessed;
Let but his mind unfettered tread,
Far as the paths of knowledge lead,
And wise as well as blest.
No fears his peace of mind annoy,
Lest printed lies his fame destroy,
Which laboured years have won;
Nor packed committees break his rest,
Nor av’rice sends him forth in quest
Of climes beneath the sun.
Short is our span; then why engage
In schemes, for which man’s transient age
Was ne’er by fate designed?
Why slight the gifts of nature’s hand?
What wanderer from his native land
E’er left himself behind?
The restless thought and wayward will,
And discontent, attend him still,
Nor quit him while he lives;
At sea, care follows in the wind;
At land, it mounts the pad behind,
Or with the postboy drives.
He who would happy live to-day,
Must laugh the present ills away,
Nor think of woes to come;
For come they will, or soon or late,
Since mixed at best is man’s estate,
By heaven’s eternal doom.
In allusion to his own situation, he wrote the following lines in
Mickle’s translation of Camoën’s “Lusiad,” at the end of the speech of
Pacheo:--
Yet shrink not, gallant Lusiad, nor repine
That man’s eternal destiny is thine;
Whene’er success the advent’rous chief befriends,
Fell malice on his parting steps attends;
On Britain’s candidates for fame await,
As now on thee, the hard decrees of fate;
Thus are ambition’s fondest hopes o’erreach’d,
One dies imprison’d, and one lives impeach’d.
Mr. Seward, who published these lines with a portrait of Mr. Hastings,
from a bust by the late Mr. Banks, observes, that his head resembles the
head of Aratus, the founder of the Achæan league, in the Ludovísi
gardens at Rome.