Cadland,[1]Southampton River.

If ever sea-maid, from her coral cave,     Beneath the hum of the great surge, has loved     To pass delighted from her green abode,     And, seated on a summer bank, to sing     No earthly music; in a spot like this,     The bard might feign he heard her, as she dried     Her golden hair, yet dripping from the main,     In the slant sunbeam.     So the pensive bard     Might image, warmed by this enchanting scene,     The ideal form; but though such things are not,     He who has ever felt a thought refined;     He who has wandered on the sea of life,     Forming delightful visions of a home     Of beauty and repose; he who has loved,     With filial warmth his country, will not pass     Without a look of more than tenderness     On all the scene; from where the pensile birch     Bends on the bank, amid the clustered group     Of the dark hollies; to the woody shore     That steals diminished, to the distant spires     Of Hampton, crowning the long lucid wave.     White in the sun, beneath the forest-shade,     Full shines the frequent sail, like Vanity,     As she goes onward in her glittering trim,     Amid the glances of life's transient morn,     Calling on all to view her!         Vectis[2] there,     That slopes its greensward to the lambent wave,     And shows through softest haze its woods and domes,     With gray St Catherine's[3] creeping to the sky,     Seems like a modest maid, who charms the more     Concealing half her beauties.         To the East,     Proud, yet complacent, on its subject realm,     With masts innumerable thronged, and hulls     Seen indistinct, but formidable, mark     Albion's vast fleet, that, like the impatient storm,     Waits but the word to thunder and flash death     On him who dares approach to violate     The shores and living scenes that smile secure     Beneath its dragon-watch!         Long may they smile!     And long, majestic Albion (while the sound     From East to West, from Albis[4] to the Po,     Of dark contention hurtles), may'st thou rest,     As calm and beautiful this sylvan scene     Looks on the refluent wave that steals below.