Introduction to Canto Third

      To WILLIAM ERSKINE, ESQ. Ashestiel, Ettrick Forest.

       Table of Contents

      Like April morning clouds, that pass,

       With varying shadow, o’er the grass,

       And imitate, on field and furrow,

       Life’s chequered scene of joy and sorrow;

       Like streamlet of the mountain North,

       Now in a torrent racing forth,

       Now winding slow its silver train,

       And almost slumbering on the plain;

       Like breezes of the Autumn day,

       Whose voice inconstant dies away,

       And ever swells again as fast,

       When the ear deems its murmur past;

       Thus various, my romantic theme

       Flits, winds, or sinks, a morning dream.

       Yet pleased, our eye pursues the trace

       Of light and shade’s inconstant race;

       Pleased, views the rivulet afar,

       Weaving its maze irregular;

       And pleased, we listen as the breeze

       Heaves its wild sigh through Autumn trees;

       Then, wild as cloud, or stream, or gale,

       Flow on, flow unconfined, my tale!

      Need I to thee, dear Erskine, tell

       I love the license all too well,

       In sounds now lowly, and now strong,

       To raise the desultory song?

       Oft, when mid such capricious chime,

       Some transient fit of lofty rhyme

       To thy kind judgment seemed excuse

       For many an error of the muse,

       Oft hast thou said, “If, still misspent,

       Thine hours to poetry are lent,

       Go, and to tame thy wandering course,

       Quaff from the fountain at the source;

       Approach those masters, o’er whose tomb

       Immortal laurels ever bloom:

       Instructive of the feebler bard,

       Still from the grave their voice is heard;

       From them, and from the paths they showed,

       Choose honoured guide and practised road:

       Nor ramble on through brake and maze,

       With harpers rude, of barbarous days.

      “Or deem’st thou not our later time

       Yields topic meet for classic rhyme?

       Hast thou no elegiac verse

       For Brunswick’s venerable hearse?

       What! not a line, a tear, a sigh,

       When valour bleeds for liberty?

       Oh, hero of that glorious time,

       When, with unrivalled light sublime -

       Though martial Austria, and though all

       The might of Russia, and the Gaul,

       Though banded Europe stood her foes -

       The star of Brandenburg arose!

       Thou couldst not live to see her beam

       For ever quenched in Jena’s stream.

       Lamented chief!—it was not given

       To thee to change the doom of Heaven,

       And crush that dragon in its birth,

       Predestined scourge of guilty earth.

       Lamented chief!—not thine the power

       To save in that presumptuous hour,

       When Prussia hurried to the field,

       And snatched the spear, but left the shield!

       Valour and skill ‘twas thine to try,

       And, tried in vain, ‘twas thine to die.

       Ill had it seemed thy silver hair

       The last, the bitterest pang to share,

       For princedom reft, and scutcheons riven,

       And birthrights to usurpers given;

       Thy land’s, thy children’s wrongs to feel,

       And witness woes thou couldst not heal!

       On thee relenting Heaven bestows

       For honoured life an honoured close;

       And when revolves, in time’s sure change,

       The hour of Germany’s revenge,

       When, breathing fury for her sake,

       Some new Arminius shall awake,

       Her champion, ere he strike, shall come

       To whet his sword on Brunswick’s tomb.

      “Or of the red-cross hero teach,

       Dauntless in dungeon as on breach:

       Alike to him the sea, the shore,

       The brand, the bridle, or the oar.

       Alike to him the war that calls

       Its votaries to the shattered walls,

       Which the grim Turk, besmeared with blood,

       Against the invincible made good;

       Or that, whose thundering voice could wake

       The silence of the polar lake,

       When stubborn Russ, and mettled Swede,

       On the warped wave their death-game played;

       Or that, where vengeance and affright

       Howled round the father of the fight,

       Who snatched, on Alexandria’s sand,

       The conqueror’s wreath with dying hand.

      “Or, if to touch such chord