MERRY ENGLAND.

———

BY J. R. LOWELL.

———

Hurrah for merry England,

Queen of the land and sea,

The champion of truth and right,

The bulwark of the free!

Hurrah for merry England!

Upon thy seagirt isle

Thou sittest, clothed in righteousness,

Secure of Heaven’s smile!

When ruled the fairhaired Saxon,

Yes, thou wert merry then;

And, as they girt their bucklers on,

Thy meanest serfs were men;

And merry was the castle-hall

With jest and song and tale,

When bearded lips with mead were white

And rang the loud Washael!

And, when grim Denmark’s black-browed prows

Tore through thine Emerald sea,

And many a wild blue eye was turned

In savage lust on thee,—

When, in the greenest of thy vales,

The gusts of summer air

Blew out in long and shaggy locks

The sea-king’s yellow hair,—

Yet Alfred was in England,

And merry yet again

Thy white-armèd Saxon maidens were

When, on the drunken Dane,

The sudden thunders of thy war

With arrowy hail did pour,

And grim jaws dropt that quivered yet

With savage hymns to Thor.

Thy merry brow was fair and free,

Thine eye gleamed like a lance,

When thy good ash and yew did crush

The gilded knights of France;

When Paris shook within her walls

And trembled as she saw

Her snow-white lilies trampled down

Beneath thy lion’s paw.

Queen Bess’s days were merry days,

Renowned in song and tale,

Stout days that saw the last brown bead

Of many a tun of ale;

Queen Bess’s days were golden days

And thou full proudly then

Did’st suckle at thy healthy breasts

The best of Englishmen.

Thou hast been merry, England,

But art thou merry now,

With sweat of agonizing years

Upon thy harlot brow,

Grimed with the smoke of furnaces

That forge with damned art

The bars of darkness that shut in

The poor man’s starving heart?

Oh free and Christian England!

The Hindu wife no more

Shall burn herself in that broad realm

Saint George’s cross waves o’er;

Thou art the champion of the right,

The friend of the opprest,

And none but freemen now shall tread

Thine Indies of the West.

But thou canst ship thy poison,

Wrung from lean Hindu slaves,

To fill all China with dead souls

That rot in living graves;

And, that thy faith may not be seen

Barren of goodly works,

At Saint Jean D’Acre thou sent’st up

To Heaven three thousand Turks.

Fling high your greasy caps in air,

Slaves of the forge and loom,

If on the soil ye’re pent and starved

Yet underneath there’s room;

Fling high your caps, for, God be praised,

Your epitaph shall be,

“Who sets his foot on English soil

Thenceforward he is free!”

Shout too for merry England

Ye factory-children thin,

Upon whose little hearts the sun

Hath never once looked in;

For, when your hollow eyes shall close

The poor-house hell to balk,

(Thank God for liberty of speech)

The parliament will talk.

Thank God, lean sons of Erin,

Who reverence the Pope

In England consciences are free

And ye are free—to hope;

And if the Church of England priest

Distrain—why, what of that?

Their consciences are freer still

Who wear the shovel-hat.

The poet loves the silent past,

And, in his fruitful rhyme,

He sets the fairest flowers o’er

The grave of buried time;

But, from the graves of thy dark years,

The night-shade’s ugly blue

And spotted henbane shall grow up

To poison Heaven’s dew.

Woe to thee, fallen England,

Who hast betrayed the word,

And knelt before a Church when thou

Shouldst kneel before the Lord!

And, for that scarlet woman

Who sits in places high,

There cometh vengeance swift to quench

The lewdness in her eye.

Woe to thee, fallen England,

Who, in thy night-mare sleep,

O’er a volcano’s heart dost toss

Whence sudden wrath shall leap

Of that forgotten Titan

Who now is trodden down

That one weak Guelphic girl may wear

Her plaything of a crown!

That Titan’s heart is heaving now,

And, with its huge uprise,

On their sand basements lean and crack

The old moss-covered lies;

For freedom through long centuries

Lives in eternal youth,

And nothing can for ever part

The human soul and truth.