The first coup by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright, polished poem—with its couplets all in martinet-like order—called the Pleasures of Hope. We all know it, if for nothing more, by reason of the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland:
“Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time!
Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;
Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,
Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe!
Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,
Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career,
Hope for a season bade the world farewell,
And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”
Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon the coffin of the poet.