“Oh Ellen! how delicious was that light
Wherein our plighted shadows used to blend,
[Pg 311]
Meanwhile the melancholy bird of night—
No more of that——the lover’s at an end.
Yet if I may advise you, as a friend,
Before you next pen sentiments so fond,
Study your cycles—I would recommend
Our Airy—and let South be duly conn’d,
And take a dip, I beg, in the great Pond.
“Farewell again! it is farewell for ever!
Before your lamp of night be lit up thrice,
I shall be sailing, haply, for Swan River,
Jamaica, or the Indian land of rice,
Or Boothia Felix—happy clime of ice!
For Trebizond, or distant Scanderoon,
Ceylon, or Java redolent of spice,
Or settling, neighbour of the Cape baboon,
Or roaming o’er—The Mountains of the Moon!
“What matters where? my world no longer owns
That dear meridian spot from which I dated
Degrees of distance, hemispheres, and zones,
A globe all blank and barren and belated.
What matters where my future life be fated?
With Lapland hordes, or Koords or Afric peasant,
A squatter in the western woods located,
What matters where? My bias, at the present,
Leans to the country that reveres the Crescent!
“Farewell! and if for ever, fare thee well!
As wrote another of my fellow-martyrs:
I ask no sexton for his passing-bell,
I do not ask your tear-drops to be starters,
However I may die, transfix’d by Tartars,
By Cobras poisoned, by Constrictors strangled,
By shark or cayman snapt above the garters,
[Pg 312]
By royal tiger or Cape lion mangled,
Or starved to death in the wild woods entangled,
“Or tortured slowly at an Indian sta............